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THREE 



English Statesmen: 



A COURSE OF LECTURES 



ON THE 



POLITICAL HISTORY of ENGLAND. 



By GOLDWIN SMITH. 



1867 

NEW YORK- 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 

FRANKLIN SQUARE. 
18 6 7. 



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TO 



THOMAS BAYLEY POTTER, M.P., 

A STAUNCH FRIEND OF 
HUMANITY AND JUSTICE IN THEIR TIME OF NEED, 

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THREE ENGLISH STATESMEN. 



i 

Let us never glorify revolution. Statesman- 
ship is the art of avoiding it, and of making 
progress at once continuous and calm. Revolu- 
tions are not only full of all that a good citizen 
and a good Christian hates while they last, but 
they leave a long train of bitterness behind. 
The energy and the exaltation of character 
which they call forth are paid for in the lassi- 
tude, the depression, the political infidelity which 
ensue. The great spirits of the English Revolu- 
tion were followed by the men of Charles II. 
Whatever of moral grandeur there was in the 
French Revolution was followed by Bonapartism 
and Talleyrand. Even while the great men are 
on the scene, violence and one-sidedness mar 
their greatness. Let* us pray that all our polit- 



8 Three English Statesmen. 

ical contests may be carried on as the contests of 
fellow-citizen, and beneath the unassailed majes- 
ty of law. But the chiefest authors of revolu- 
tions have been not the chimerical and intemper- 
ate friends of progress, but the blind obstructers 
of progress; those who, in defiance of nature, 
struggle to avert the inevitable future, to recall 
the irrevocable past ; who chafe to fury by dam- 
ming up its course the river which would other- 
wise flow calmly between its banks, which has 
ever flowed, and which, do what they will, must 
flow forever. 

If a revolution ever was redeemed by its 
grandeur, it was the revolution which was open- 
ed by Pym, which was closed by Cromwell, of 
which Milton was the apostle and the poet. 
The material forces have been seen in action on a 
more imposing scale, the moral forces never. 
Why is that regard for principle which was so 
strong among us then, comparatively so weak 
among us now ? The greatest member of Parlia- 
ment that ever lived, the greatest master of the 
convictions and the feelings of the House of 
Commons, was not Robert Peel, but John Pym. 
But if Pym, in modern garb and using modern 
phrase, could now rise in his old place, his words, 
though as practical as they are lofty, would, I 
fear, be thought " too cleve^ for the House." Is 



Pym. 9 

it that wealth, too much accumulated and too lit- 
tle diffused, has placed the leadership of the na- 
tion in less noble hands ? 

We must not regard this revolution merely as 
the struggle of the English House of Commons 
against the tyranny of Charles I. It was part of 
a European conflict between two great opposing 
currents of opinion, one running toward the fu- 
ture, the other toward the past. The Reforma- 
tion, like all really great movements, was relig- 
ious ; but acting on the deepest part of humani- 
ty, it impelled forward the whole nature of man ; 
and the reaction against it accordingly was a re- 
action of all the powers of the past! In Spain 
the reaction, both political and ecclesiastical, had 
triumphed through the alliance of the Inquisition 
and the kings. In France the political reaction 
had triumphed through the policy of Richelieu, 
whom some, thinking more of organization than 
of life, numbered with the friends of progress; the 
rest was to be done by Louis XIV. In Ger- 
many, Austria and the Catholic League had near- 
ly crushed the independence of the Protestant 
states, and made a Catholic empire of the land of 
Luther. At first the Reformation, with liberty 
in its train, had spread over all the nations that 
spoke a Teutonic tongue ; it had spread over a 
great part of France ; it had gained a footing in 

A2 



io Three English Statesmen. 

Italy and Spain. Now, England and Holland 
seemed to stand almost alone. It was a crisis as 
perilous as that of the Armada. How natural to 
humanity, wearied and perplexed with change, is 
this yearning for the thrones and for the altars 
of the past ! 

In England, however, not only was there this 
conflict between the Eeformation and its enemies. 
Here, the real reformation was still to come. 
The reformation of Henry VIII. was a royal ref- 
ormation, which put the king in the place of the 
pope. The people were now to have their ref- 
ormation, a reformation of conviction, which put 
conscience in the place both of pope and king. 

I take for granted a knowledge of the reign 
of James I. ; the glories of Elizabeth lighting 
up the shame of her successor; the fatal ques- 
tion whether sovereign power resided with the 
king or with the parliament, kept undecided by 
her tact, forced to decision by his folly; the 
weaknesses of a sovereign who seemed born to 
advance constitutional liberty by provoking re- 
sistance which he could not quell, and proclaim- 
ing principles of absolutism which he could not 
sustain; the close alliance between prerogative 
and the priest party, the king insulting the 
Puritan divines at the Hampton Court confer, 
ence, and the bishops prostrate in grateful ecsta- 



Pym. ii 

sies at his feet; tlie government of favorites, 
whose names were by-words of infamy ; the ju- 
dicial murder of Raleigh ; the disgrace of Chief- 
Justice Coke, and of the common law in his per- 
son ; the divorce of Essex ; the murder of Over- 
bury ; the mysterious threats by which the mur- 
derers appealed not in vain to the guilty con- 
science of the king ; the uprising of the Com- 
mons ; the Protestation of Right ; the storm of 
national resentment to which the court sacrificed 
Bacon — Bacon, who served darkness in the hope 
that when he had raised himself to power his 
science would make the darkness light, the dupe 
of a dream of beneficent despotism, a warning to 
fastidious minds if they would work for the peo- 
ple to work with and by the people. 

I take for granted, too, a knowledge of the 
early part of the life and reign of Charles : the 
ominous episode of the Spanish match ; the 
scenes of duplicity which followed, already re- 
vealing the dark spot in Charles's character ; the 
ascendancy of Buckingham, safely intrenched in 
favor, more safely than ever Strafford was, be- 
cause his mind was not above that of his master ; 
the coronation, in which the bishops and their 
paraphernalia played so conspicuous a part; the 
brief honey-moon of the new king and his parlia- 
ment; the renewal of the struggle; Charles's 



12 Three English Statesmen. 

policy oscillating between government by Parlia- 
ment and government by prerogative, and both 
ways fatally to himself; his foreign policy oscil- 
lating between the support of Protestant free- 
dom, for which the nation called, and the support 
of Catholic absolutism, toward which his own 
heart yearned ; the French queen, with her 
French notions of what a king and a queen 
should be; the beginnings of arbitrary taxation 
and military rule ; the " great, warm, and ruffling 
parliament," as Whitelocke calls it, by which 
those encroachments were withstood ; the Peti- 
tion of Right, that complement of the Great 
Charter, which declares that Englishmen shall 
never be subject to martial law, and which if it 
be tampered with in our day, though it be in the 
person of the humblest English subject, we pur- 
pose, after the example of our great forefathers, 
to make good. 

At last Charles broke with his parliament, 
passionately dissolved it amid a scene of tem- 
pestuous violence (the speaker being held down 
in his chair till the protest of the Commons had 
been made), and by proclamation forbade any 
man to talk of a parliament being ever held 
again. The leader of the Commons, Sir John 
Eliot, was thrown into the Tower. There he 
sank at last beneath the bad air and the chills of 



Pym. 13 

his prison-house, constantly refusing, as a cham- 
pion of the law, to do homage to lawlessness by 
submission. " My lodgings are removed, and I 
am now where candle-light may be suffered, but 
scarce fire." So he writes when he is dying of 
consumption. The court knew what they were 
doing. " I must tell you," writes Lord Cotting- 
ton to the renegade Strafford, "that your old, 
dear friend Sir John Eliot is very like to die." 
His family petitioned for leave to bury him 
among his fathers in his Cornish home. The 
king wrote at the foot of the petition, " Let Sir 
John Eliot's body be buried in the church of 
that parish where he died." But Sir John 
Eliot's spirit rose in the king's path in a decisive 
hour. 

Then followed eleven years of government by 
prerogative — in place of Parliament, the triune 
despotism of the Privy Council, the Star Cham- 
ber, the Court of High Commission ; in place of 
laws, proclamations ; in place of courts of law, 
courts of arbitrary power ; in place of legal taxa- 
tion by Parliament, forced loans, monopolies, 
feudal and forest extortions, ship-money ; the ten- 
ure of the judges made during the king's pleas- 
ure, that they might be perfect slaves to the 
king's will ; the tamperings with the bench, by 
which old Judge Whitelocke warned Laud he 



14 Three English Statesmen. 

would in the end raise a flame in the nation ; the 
" Book of Sports" put forth not only to do de- 
spite to the Puritan Sabbath, but to make a mer- 
ry England, free from political thought; the 
Protestant cause abroad openly abandoned ; the 
strength of the nation declining as the power of 
the crown rose, and Barbary pirates riding tri- 
umphant in the Channel; Strafford and Laud 
with their policy of Thorough; Laud, Primate 
and Chancellor, extirpating freedom of thought 
in England ; Strafford, lord deputy of Ireland, 
making ready there an army for the completion 
of the joint work, and reading us two lessons 
which from so able an enemy we shall do well to 
learn; first, that a standing army is a standing 
menace to public liberty ; and, secondly, that ar- 
bitrary government in a dependency is the step- 
ping-stone to arbitrary government at home. 
Hopelessly as it seemed at the time, Hampden 
withstood ship-money: he was cast in his suit 
before a servile and unjust court, but he proved 
that in a righteous cause a defeat before an un- 
just court may be a victory before the people. 

"With tyranny in the State, tyranny in the 
Church went hand in hand. Intimate is the con- 
nection between political freedom and freedom 
of the soul ; eternal is the alliance of the Lauds 
and the Straffords against both. Reaction in the 



Pym. 1 S 

State and reaction in the Church, a Komanizing 
clergy, and a government tending to martial law, 
these are the joint characteristics not of one age 
alone. The dry bones of the Tudor episcopate 
had now begun to live with a portentous life of 
priestly ambition, the source of which was Koine, 
and which soon sought union with its source. 
To unprotestantize the Church of England, Laud 
labored with canons and ordinances, with books 
and sermons, with preferments for the compliant, 
with whips, pillories, and banishment for recu- 
sants, at a rate which happily for us left prudence 
as well as charity and humanity behind. Prot- 
estant preachers were driven from their pulpits, 
harried out of the kingdom— among them the 
favorite preacher of an obscure sectary named 
Cromwell. The altar was set up again in place 
of the communion table. The eucharistic miracle, 
the talisman of priestly power, was again per- 
formed. Clerical celibacy, monachism, the confesA 
sional, were coming in due course. Persons of \ 
quality especially embraced a religion of flowers 
and incense^ of millineries and upholsteries, of in-/ 
sinuatmg directors. . Only some spirits, too impa- 
tient and too logical, could not be kept from cut- 
ting short the process and going at once to 
Rome. The Protestant refugee churches in En- 
gland were crushed; it seems their members 



1 6 Three English Statesmen, 

kept some trade secrets to themselves, and did 
not contribute so much as was to "be desired to 
the wealth of the kingdom. The communion of 
the Protestant churches abroad, which Hooker 
had acknowledged, was renounced, because hav- 
ing no bishops they could not be Christian ; and 
this no doubt was called the reunion of Christen- 
dom. To all this the hearty support of the 
Court was given, and it was well earned. The 
High Church clergy preached the Loan as vigor- 
ously as the Real Presence or the Apostolical 
Succession. The court divine, Manwaring, said 
in one of his famous sermons, " that the first of 
all relations was that between the Creator and 
the creature ; the next between husband and 
wife ; the third between parent and child ; the 
fourth between lord and servant ; and that from 
all these arose that most high, sacred, and tran- 
scendent relation between king and subject." In 
another passage he asks himself i(t Why religion 
doth associate God and the king?" and he answers, 
" that it may be for one of three reasons ; be- 
cause in Scripture the name of god is given to an- 
gels, priests, and kings ; or from the propinquity 
of offenses against God and his anointed king ; 
or from the parity of beneficence which men en- 
joy from sacred kings, and which they can no 
more requite in the case of the king than in the 



Pym. 17 

ease of God." He reasons, " that as justice, proper- 
ly so called, intercedes not "between God and 
man, nor between the prince, being the father, 
and the people as children (for justice is between 
equals), so can not justice be any rule or medium 
whereby to give God or the king his right." 
And again, he draws a comparison between the 
dignity of angels and that of kings from which it 
is plain that bishoprics are not in the gift of the 
angels. This in the Chapel Eoyal, where, as 
Pym said, that doctrine was already so well be- 
lieved that no man needed to be converted. 
Manwaring, Sibthorpe, and Montagu belong as 
yet not wholly to the past ; but the members of 
the Church of England have the happiness of 
knowing that there are some at least among her 
clergy in high places who labor, and labor suc- 
cessfully, to lay her foundations not in political 
power but in the free affection of the people ; to 
present her as the friend and the consecrator, not 
as the enemy, of human progress ; and to ally her 
not with injustice but with justice. 

When Charles dismissed his parliament, the 
day was going hard with the Protestant cause in 
Germany, the great scene of the conflict, to which 
the eyes of all Protestants were wistfully and 
sadly turned. Tilly and "Wallenstein were carry- 
ing all before them ; and the last hope of Protest- 



1 8 Three English Statesmen. 

autism seemed to expire when the King of Den- 
mark was overthrown. Suddenly a light shone 
in the north. Gustavus Adolphus appeared 
upon the scene. Leipsic, the Gettysburg of the 
seventeenth century, was fought ; and the tidings 
of a great deliverance and the name of a great 
deliverer made the heart of the oppressed to 
leap for joy, and loosened the knees of the op- 
pressor. English and Scottish soldiers of Gusta- 
vus, the Garibaldians of their day, came back, not 
a few to England, many to Scotland, with Gari- 
baldian memories and sentiments in their hearts. 

Then Laud laid his rash hand upon the relig- 
ious independence of Scotland ; and the Scotch 
nation, nobles and commons, ministers and peo- 
ple, wonderfully fused together by fiery enthusi- 
asm, poured like a lava torrent on the aggressor. 
English sympathies fought on the Scottish side ; 
English soldiers refused to conquer for Laud. 
Strafford's Irish army was not ready. Govern- 
ment by prerogative fell, and Charles called a 
parliament. 

After eleven years without parliaments, most 
of the members were new. But they had not to 
seek a leader. They had one whom all accepted 
in John Pym. Pym had been* second only to 
Sir John Eliot as a leader of the patriot party in 
the reign of James. He was one of the twelve 



Pym. 19 

deputies of the Commons when James cried, 
with insight as well as spleen, " Set twal chairs ; 
here be twal kings coming." He had stood 
among the foremost of those " evil-tempered spir- 
its" who protested that the liberties of Parliament 
were not the favors of the crown, .but the birth- 
right of Englishmen, and who for so doing were 
imprisoned without law. He had resolved, as he 
said, that he would rather suffer for speaking 
the truth, than the truth should suffer for 
want of his speaking. His greatness had in- 
creased in the struggle against Charles I. He 
had been one of the chief managers of the im- 
peachment of Buckingham ; and for that service 
to public justice, he had again suffered a glorious 
imprisonment. He had accused Manwaring ; he 
had raised a voice of power against the Koman- 
izing intrigues of Laud. In those days, he and 
Strafford were dear friends, and fellow -soldiers 
in the same cause. But when the death of Buck- 
ingham left the place of First Minister vacant, 
Strafford sought an interview with Pym at 
Greenwich ; and when they met began to talk 
against dangerous courses, and to hint at advanta- 
geous overtures to be made by the court. Pym cut 
him short: "You need not use all this art to tell me 
that you have a mind to leave us. But remember 
what I tell you— you are going to be undone. 



20 Three English Statesmen. 

And remember also, that though you leave us, I 
will never leave you while your head is upon 
your shoulders !" Such at least was the story 
current in the succeeding age of the last inter- 
view between the Great Champion of Freedom 
and the Great Apostate. 

Pym was a Somersetshire gentleman of good 
family ; and it was from good families — such fam- 
ilies at least as do not produce Jacobins — that 
most of the leaders of this revolution sprang. I 
note it, not to claim for principle the patronage 
of birth and wealth, but to show how strong that 
principle must have been which could thus move 
birth and wealth away from their natural bias. 
It is still true, not in the ascetic, but in the moral 
sense, that it is hard for a rich man to enter into 
the kingdom of heaven ; and when we see rich 
men entering into the kingdom of heaven, hazard- 
ing the enjoyment of wealth for the sake of prin- 
ciple, we may know that it is no common age. 
Oxford was the place of Pym's education, and 
there he was distinguished not only by solid ac- 
quirements, but by elegant accomplishments, so 
that an Oxford poet calls him the favorite of 
Apollo. High culture is now rather in disgrace 
in some quarters, and not without a color of rea- 
son, as unbracing the sinews of action and de- 
stroying sympathy with the people. Neverthe- 



Pym. 2 1 

less, the universities produced the great states- 
men and the great warriors of the Commonwealth. 
If the Oxford of Pym, of Hampden, and of Blake, 
the Oxford of Wycliffe, the Oxford where in still 
earlier times those principles were nursed which 
gave us the Great Charter and the House of 
Commons — if this Oxford, I say, now seems by 
her political bearing to dishonor learning, and by 
an ignoble choice does a wrong to the nation 
which Lancashire is called upon to redress — be- 
lieve me, it is not the University which thus of- 
fends, but a power alien to the University and 
alien to learning, to which the University is, and, 
unless you rescue her, will continue to be, a slave. 

It is another point of difference between the 
English and the French revolutions that the 
leaders of the English Revolution were as a rule 
good husbands and fathers, in whom domestic af- 
fection was the root of public virtue. Pym, 
after being for some time in public life, married, 
and after his marriage lived six years in retire- 
ment — a part of training as necessary as action 
to the depth of character and the power of sus- 
tained thought which are the elements of great- 
ness. At the end of the six years his wife died, 
and he took no other wife but his country. 

There were many elements in the patriot par- 
ty, united at first, afterward severed from each 



22 Three English Statesmen. 

other by the fierce winno wing-fan of the struggle, 
and marking by their successive ascendancy the 
changing phases of the revolution : Constitution- 
al Monarchists, aristocratic Kepublicans, Kepub- 
licans thorough-going, Protestant Episcopalians, 
Presbyterians, Independents, and in the abyss be- 
neath them all the Anabaptists, the Fifth Mon- 
archy men, and the Levellers. Pym was a friend 
of constitutional monarchy in politics, a Protest- 
ant Episcopalian in religion; against a despot, 
but for a king; against the tyranny and political 
power of the bishops, but satisfied with that 
form of church government. He was no fanatic, 
and no ascetic. He was genial, social, even con- 
vivial. His enemies held him up to the hatred 
of the sectaries as a man of pleasure. As the 
statesman and orator of the less extreme party, 
and of the first period of the revolution, he is the 
English counterpart of Mirabeau, so far as a Chris- 
tian patriot can be the counterpart of a Voltairean 
debauchee. 

Nor is he altogether unlike Mirabeau in the 
style of his eloquence, our better appreciation of 
which, as well as our better knowledge of Pym 
and of this the heroic age of our history in gener- 
al, we owe to the patriotic and truly noble dili- 
gence of Mr. John Forster, from whose researches 
no small portion of my materials for this lecture 



Pym. 23 

is derived. Pym's speeches of course are seven- 
teenth-century speeches ; stately in diction, some- 
what like homilies in their divisions, full of 
learning, full of Scripture (which then, "be it re- 
membered, was a fresh spring of new thought), full 
of philosophic passages which might have come 
from the pen of Hooker or of Bacon. But they 
sometimes strike the great strokes for which 
Mirabeau was famous. Buckingham had plead- 
ed to the charge of enriching himself by the sale 
of honors and offices, that so far from having en- 
riched himself he was £100,000 in debt. " If this 
be true," replied Pym, " how can we hope to sat- 
isfy his immense prodigality ; if false, how can 
we hope to satisfy his covetousness ?" In the 
debate on the Petition of Eight, when Secretary 
Cooke desired in the name of the king to know 
whether they would take the king's word for 
the observance of their liberties or not, " there 
was silence for a good space," none liking to re- 
ject the king's word, all knowing what that word 
was worth. The silence was broken by Pym, 
who rose and said, " We have his majesty's coro- 
nation oath to maintain the laws of England; 
what need we then to take his word V And 
the secretary desperately pressing his point, and 
asking what foreigners would think if the people 
of England refused to trust their king's word, 



24 Three English Statesmen. 

Pym rejoined, " Truly, Mr. Secretary, I am of the 
same opinion that I was, that the king's oath is 
as powerful as his word." In the same debate 
the courtiers prayed the House to leave entire 
his majesty's sovereign power — a Stuart phrase, 
meaning the power of the king when he deemed 
it expedient to break the law. " I am not able," 
was Pym's reply, " to speak to this question. I 
know not what it is. All our petition is for the 
laws of England; and this power seems to be 
another power distinct from the power of the 
law. I know how to add sovereign to the king's 
person, but not to his power. We can not leave 
to him a sovereign power, for we never were pos- 
sessed of it." 

The English Revolution was a revolution of 
principle, but of principle couched in precedent. 
What the philosophic salon was to the French 
leaders of opinion, that the historical and anti- 
quarian library of Sir Robert Cotton was to the 
English. And of the group of illustrious men 
who gathered in that library, none had been a 
deeper student of its treasures than Pym. His 
speeches and state papers are the proof 

When the parliament had met, Pym was the 
first to rise. We know his appearance from his 
portrait — a portly form, which a court waiting- 
woman called that of an ox ; a forehead so high 



Pym. 25 

that lampooners compared it to a shuttle; the 
dress of a gentleman of the time : for not to the 
cavaliers alone belonged that picturesque cos- 
tume and those pointed beards, which furnish the 
real explanation of the fact that all women are 
Tories. Into the expectant and wavering, though 
ardent, minds of the inexperienced assembly he 
poured, with the authority of a veteran chief, a 
speech which at once fixed their thoughts, and 
possessed them with their mission. It was a 
broad, complete, and earnest, though undeclama- 
tory, statement of the abuses which they had 
come to reform. For reform, though for root- 
and-branch reform, not for revolution, the Short 
Parliament came : and Charles might even now 
have made his peace with his people. But 
Charles did not yet see the truth: the truth 
could never pierce through the divinity that 
hedged round the king. The Commons insisted 
that redress of grievances should go before sup- 
ply. In a moment of madness, or what is the 
same thing, of compliance with the counsels of 
Laud, Charles dissolved the parliament, imprison- 
ed several of its members, and published his rea- 
sons in a proclamation full of despotic doctrine. 
The friends of the crown were sad, its enemies 
very joyful. Now, to the eye of history, begins 
to rise that scaffold before Whitehall 

B 



26 Three English Statesmen. 

Once more Charles and Strafford tried their 
desperate arms against the Scotch; and once 
more their soldiers refused to fight. Pym and 
Hampden, meanwhile, sure of the issue, were 
preparing their party and the nation for the de- 
cisive struggle. Their head-quarters were at 
Pym's house, in Gray's Inn Lane ; but meetings 
were held also at the houses of leaders in the 
country, especially for correspondence with the 
Scotch, with whom these patriot traitors were 
undoubtedly in league. A private press was 
actively at work. Pym was not only the orator 
of his party, but its soul and centre ; he knew 
how not only to propagate his opinions with 
words of power, but to organize the means of 
victory. And now Charles, in extremity, turned 
to the middle ages for one expedient more, and 
called a Great Council of Peers, according to 
Plantagenet precedents, at York. Pym flew at 
once to York, caused a petition for a parliament 
to be signed by the peers of his party there, and 
backed it with petitions from the people, one of 
them signed by 10,000 citizens of London. This 
first great wielder of public opinion in England 
was the inventor of organized agitation by peti- 
tion. The king surrendered, and called a parlia- 
ment. Pym and Hampden rode over the coun- 
try, urging the constituencies to do their dut} r . 



Pym. 27 

The constituencies did their duty, as perhaps they 
had never done it before, and have never done it 
since. They sent up the noblest body of men 
that ever sat in the councils of a nation. The 
force of the agitation triumphed for the moment, 
as it did again in 1830, over all those defects in 
the system of representation which prevail over 
the public interest and the public sentiment in 
ordinary times. The Long Parliament met, 
while round it the tide of national feeling swell- 
ed and surged, the long-pent-up voices of na- 
tional resentment broke forth. It met not for re- 
form, but for revolution. The king did not ride 
to it in state ; he slunk to it in his private barge, 
like a vanquished and a doomed man. 

Charles had called to him Strafford. The earl 
knew his danger ; . but the king had pledged to 
him the royal word that not a hair of his head 
should be touched. He came foiled, broken by 
disease, but still resolute, prepared to act on the 
aggressive, perhaps to arraign the leaders of the 
Commons for treasonable correspondence with 
the Scotch. But he had to deal, in his friend 
and coadjutor of former days, with no mere 
rhetorician, but with a man of action as saga- 
cious and as intrepid as himself. Pym at once 
struck a blow which proved him a master of 
revolution. Announcing to the Commons that 



28 Three English Statesmen, 

he had weighty matter to impart, he moved that 
the doors should be closed. When they were 
opened, he carried up to the Lords the impeach- 
ment of the Earl of Strafford. The earl came 
down to the House of Lords that day with his 
brow of imperial gloom, his impetuous step, his 
tones and gestures of command: but scarcely 
had he entered the house when he found that 
power had departed from him; and the terrible 
grand vizier of government by prerogative went 
away a fallen man, none unbonneting to him, in 
whose presence an hour before no man would 
have stood covered. The speech by which Pym 
swept the house on to this bold move, so that, as 
Clarendon says, " not one man was found to stop 
the torrent," is known only from Clarendon's out- 
line. But that outline shows how the speaker 
filled the thoughts of his hearers with a picture 
of the tyranny, before he named its chief author, 
the Earl of Strafford ; and how he blended with 
the elements of indignation some lighter pas- 
sages of the earl's vanity and amours, to mingle 
indignation with contempt and to banish fear. 

Through the report of the Scotch Commission- 
er Baillie we see the great trial, to which that 
of Warren Hastings was a parallel in splendor, 
but no parallel in interest — Westminster Hall 
filled with the Peers, the Commons, the foreign 



Pym. 29 

nobility, come to learn if they could a lesson in 
English politics — the ladies of quality, whose 
hearts (and we can pardon them) were all with 
the great criminal who made so gallant and skill- 
ful a fight for life, and of whom it was said that, 
like Ulysses, he had not beauty, but he had the 
eloquence which moved a goddess to love. 
Among the mass of the audience the interest, in- 
tense at first, flagged as the immense process 
went on ; and eating, drinking, loud talking filled 
the intervals of the trial. But there was one 
whose interest did not flag. The royal throne 
was set for the king in his place ; but the king 
was not there. He was with his queen in a pri- 
vate gallery, the lattice-work of which, in his 
eagerness to hear, he broke through with his 
own hands. And there he heard, among other 
things, these words of Pym: "If the histories of 
eastern countries be pursued, whose princes order 
their affairs according to the mischievous princi- 
ples of the Earl of Strafford, loose and absolved 
from all rules of government, they will be found 
to be frequent in combustions, full of massacres 
and of the tragical ends of princes." 

I need not make selections from a speech so 
well known as that of Pym on the trial of Straf. 
ford. But hear one or two answers to fallacies 
which are not quite dead yet. To the charge of 



3<d Three English Statesmen, 

arbitrary government in Ireland, Strafford had 
pleaded that the Irish were a conquered nation. 
" They were a conquered nation," cries Pym. 
" There can not be a word more pregnant or fruit- 
ful in treason than that word is. There are few 
nations in the world that have not been conquer- 
ed, and no doubt but the conqueror may give 
what law he pleases to those that are conquered ; 
but if the succeeding pacts and agreements do 
not limit and restrain that right, what people can 
be secure? England hath been conquered, and 
Wales hath been conquered; and by this reason 
will be in little better case than Ireland. If the 
king by the right of a conqueror gives laws to 
his people, shall not the people, by the same rea- 
son, be restored to the right of the conquered to 
recover their liberty if they can V } Strafford had 
alleged good intentions as an excuse for his evil 
counsels. " Sometimes, my lords," says Pym, 
" good and evil, truth and falsehood, lie so near 
together that they are hard to be distinguished. 
Matters hurtful and dangerous may be accom- 
panied with such circumstances as may make 
them appear useful and convenient. But where 
the matters propounded are evil in their own na- 
ture, such as the matters are wherewith the Earl 
of Strafford is charged, as to break public faith 
and to subvert laws and government, they can 



Pym, 31 

never be justified by any intentions, bow good 
soever they be pretended." Again, to the plea that 
it was a time of great danger and necessity, Pym 
replies : " If there were any necessity, it was of 
his own making ; he, by his evil counsel, had 
brought the king into a necessity; and by no 
rules of justice can be allowed to gain this ad- 
vantage by his own fault, as to make that a 
ground of his justification which is a great part 
of his offense. 

Once, we are told, while Pym was speak- 
ing, his eyes met those of Strafford, and the 
speaker grew confused, lost the thread of his 
discourse, broke down beneath the haggard 
glance of his old friend. Let us never glorify 
revolution ! 

It is commonly said that Pym and Hampden, 
finding that the evidence for the impeachment 
had failed, made short work with their victim by 
an Act of Attainder. Mr. Forster has discovered 
proof that Pym and Hampden were personally 
against resorting to an Act of Attainder, and in 
favor c€ praying judgment on the evidence in the 
regular way; but the opinion of the majority 
being opposed to theirs, they went with the rest. 
Guilty of treason against the king Strafford was 
not, for the king was his accomplice. But he was 
guilty, and he stood and stands clearly convicted 



32 Three English Statesmen. 

of that wliicli Pyni charged him — treason against 
the nation. He had " endeavored by his words, 
actions, and counsels, to subvert the fundamental 
laws of England and Ireland, and to introduce an 
arbitrary and tyrannical government." The Act 
of Attainder was not in those days what it would 
be in ours, an instrument of which no just man 
would make use against the worst and most 
dangerous of criminals. It had a place in juris- 
prudence, and would have been used on the like 
occasion as freely by one party as by the other. 
In this case the process had been perfectly judi- 
cial, and the Act of Attainder did no more than 
punish treason against the nation, as the Statute 
of Treasons would have punished treason against 
the king. " Shall it be treason," asked Pym, al- 
luding to that statute, " to embase the king's coin, 
though but a piece of twelvepence or sixpence ; 
and must it not needs be the effect of a greater 
treason to embase the spirit of his subjects, and to 
set a stamp and character of servitude on them, 
whereby they shall be disabled to do any thing 
for the service of the king and the c6mmon- 
wealth?" And he justly reasoned that laws 
would be vain if they had not a power to pre- 
serve themselves, if any aspirant to arbitrary 
power might with impunity compass their sub- 
version. Falkland voted for the Act of Attain- 



Pytn. n 

der, and Falkland would not nave voted for legis- 
lative murder. 

The Lords hesitated ; left to themselves they 
would have shrunk from convicting on a capital 
charge. But the popular clamor was loud and 
terrible. The Lords showed what in them is 
called tact, and the Bill of Attainder passed. 

The king had pledged his word that not a hair 
of Strafford's head should Ibe harmed ; and to a 
chivalrous mind the release which Strafford sent 
him would have made the pledge doubly strong. 
But the king had casuists about him, and the 
queen hated Strafford as the rival of her power, 
though she allowed that he had fine hands. Be- 
fore the trial, Charles had attempted to save his 
minister by making overtures to the leaders of 
the opposition, which, as they would have come 
in as a party on their own principles and with 
full securities, they were not only entitled but 
bound as an opposition to accept. But the ne- 
gotiation was broken off by Bedford's death. 
Charles still tried influence and entreaty. But 
the discovery of the queen's plot (for hers it 
probably was), to bring up the army and over- 
awe the parliament, sealed Strafford's doom. 
And so that promise made in the conference at 
Greenwich was kept to the letter. Better had it 
not been so. Better to have been satisfied with 

B2 



34 Three English Statesmen. 

establishing the principle that treason against the 
nation was as high a crime as treason against the 
king, and then to have exalted and hallowed the 
national cause by mercy. The other course ex- 
alted and half hallowed the crime. But it seems 
to have been the feeling of all patriots that the 
constitution could not be safe while Strafford 
lived. It was the moderate and chivalrous Essex 
that uttered the hard words — " Stone dead hath 
no fellow." Falkland was a party to the death 
of Strafford ; so was Hyde, who, while he labors 
to create the contrary impression, unwittingly be- 
trays himself by a subsequent admission, that 
throughout these transactions he and Falkland 
had never differed from each other. So was Lord 
Capel, though afterward, when all was changed, 
himself dying as a royalist on the scaffold, he pro- 
fessed to repent of his vote. 

Laud was impeached also. Surely no man 
ever tried the sufferance of his kind more severely 
than this persecutor in the name of an authority 
which was itself the rebel of yesterday. There is 
something singularly tyrannical in High Anglican 
pretensions. The victims of Laud had seen with 
their own eyes the introduction of the doctrines 
and the practices which they were called upon to 
accept as the immemorial and unbroken tradition 
of an immutable and infallible church. Laud 



Pym. 35 

had learned government in the petty despotism of 
a college. He was subject, as his friends said, to 
some infirmities of temper ; " that is," remarks Mr. 
Hallam, "he was choleric, harsh, vindictive, and 
even cruel to a great degree." In the case of Fel- 
ton he wished to revive the use of torture ; but 
this was too much, even for the judges of Charles 
I. Clarendon tries to make out that he suffered 
for his impartial severity to the vices of the great. 
No doubt he was rude, rude as he would have 
been to college under-graduates, to all orders of 
men, and he made himself some enemies of rank 
thereby. But he rose in life as the creature and 
parasite of Buckingham. He tried, say High 
Church writers, with complacency, to win Buck- 
ingham to the Church's cause. To the Church's 
cause, no; but to some cause which needs the 
patronage of Buckinghams. Which element pre- 
dominated in his character, that of the bigoted 
and intolerant priest, or that of the ecclesiastical 
adventurer, it is not easy to say : perhaps the Bo- 
man archives, when they are explored, may throw 
some light upon the subject. No man ever so 
distinctly conceived the alliance between civil and 
ecclesiastical tyranny. Who could conceive it so 
distinctly as the ambitious head of a hierarchy 
which was a creature of the State ? When he 
had got the great political offices placed in clerical 



2,6 Three English Statesmen. 

Lands, lie thought that all that man conld do had 
been done for the Chnrch of God. Over the 
•porch of St. Mary's Church at Oxford stand a Vir- 
gin and Child, placed there by Laud. The Virgin 
she seems to be ; but look closer, the circlet round 
her head is not a heavenly crown, but the coronet 
of a peeress. She is Political Eeligion, and in 
her arms she bears the infant Unbelief. 

Pym spoke of course in support of the im- 
peachment of Laud. He denounced in language 
strong but not virulent the perversion of God's 
law to defend the lawlessness of man, the abuse 
of the ministry ordained for the instruction of 
souls to the promotion of violence and oppres- 
sion. He remarked that "those who labored in 
civil matters to set up the king above the laws of 
the kingdom, did yet in ecclesiastical matters la- 
bor to set up themselves above the king." Laud 
was consigned to the Tower ; but no farther pro- 
ceedings were taken against him till the hand of 
death was on Pym ; and I am persuaded that had 
Pym lived, Laud would not have died. It was 
the narrower and more cruel Presbyterians that 
brought the old man to the block. 

And now that promise of a clean sweeping of 
the house from floor to roof, which Pym whis- 
pered in Clarendon's ear at the meeting of the 
parliament, was vigorously kept. All the engines 



Pym. 37 

of the tyranny were demolished ; all its chief 
agents deprived and banished. The return to 
government without parliaments was barred by 
the Triennial Act. Ship-money judges learned, 
and bequeathed to all who might like them be 
tempted to pervert law to the purposes of power, 
the lesson that the justice of a nation, though it 
sleeps, may not be dead. A doubt was raised 
whether the king would consent to the punish- 
ment of so many and such high delinquents. 
"Shall we therefore doubt of justice," said Pym, 
" because we have need of great justice 3" 

It is mournful to say that one of the com- 
plaints against the king was his lenity to Popish 
priests. But in him, the persecutor of the Puri- 
tans, this lenity was not toleration, but conniv- 
ance. When the law, hateful as it was, was as- 
serted, and the priests were left to the Commons, 
their lives were safe — safer, as Clarendon peevish- 
ly says, than if they had been pardoned under 
the great seal. Pym declared expressly that he 
did not desire any new laws against Popery, or 
any rigorous courses in the execution of those al- 
ready in force : he was far from seeking the ruin 
of their persons or estates ; only he wished they 
might be kept in such a condition as to restrain 
them from doing hurt. To restrain them from 
doing hurt was unhappily in those days part of 



38 Three English Statesmen. 

a statesman's duty. They were , liegemen and 
soldiers of that successor of the apostles whose 
confederates were Philip II. and Charles IX., and 
who struck a medal in honor of the massacre of 
St. Bartholomew. 

And now, all these reforms having been accom- 
plished, all these offenders punished, all these se- 
curities for lawful government provided, the king 
having even assented to the act which, in clear 
contradiction to his prerogative, forbade the dis- 
solution of the then parliament without its own 
consent, was it not time to bring the movement 
to a close, and to replace the sovereign power, 
which the parliament had virtually seized, in the 
king's hands % So thought many who had up to 
this point been zealous reformers, and some, at 
all events, whose opinions we are bound to treat 
with respect. So thought not Pym and Hamp- 
den. To them it seemed that the king could not 
be trusted ; that the last clay of the parliament 
would be the last of his good faith ; that they 
must go on till they had left him no power to 
undo the work which had been done. They re- 
membered the double answer to the Petition of 
Eight. They remembered, as they showed on all 
occasions, the fate of Sir John Eliot. "We have 
good reason, they perhaps had better reason, to 
believe that the court was still hostile, still in- 



Pym. 39 

triguing, still aiming at a counter revolution; 
and Clarendon owns that Charles had been per- 
suaded to consent to measures which he abhorred, 
on the ground that they might be afterward re- 
voked on the plea of duress. To the last it 
proved hard to bind this anointed king. But 
let us not forget to say emphatically, that the 
leaders of the Commons needed all this to justify 
them in giving the word for revolution. 

They prepared a great appeal to the nation, 
which took the shape of the Grand Eemonstrance. 
Charles now went to Scotland, ostensibly to set- 
tle matters there and disband the armies, really 
to make himself a party, and provide himself with 
weapons against the leaders of the opposition. 
Episcopacy being at this time threatened with 
abolition, he assured its friends that if they could 
keep the Church safe during his absence, he would 
undertake for its safety on his return. Hampden 
went, with other delegates of the parliament, to 
watch him, while Pym remained at the centre of 
affairs, one proof among many that able, powerful, 
and revered as Hampden was, Pym, not Hamp- 
den, was the real chief. The higher social posi- 
tion of Hampden is perhaps the main source of 
the contrary impression. King Pym was the 
name given to Pym by the lampooners, and 
though in jest they spoke the truth. " The most 



4-0 Three English Statesmen. 

popular man," says Clarendon, " and the most 
able to do hurt, that hath lived in any time." 
The most able to do hurt, that is the phrase : how 
can a leader of the people use his power for good % 
And now came the sinister news of the attempt 
to make away with or kidnap the covenanting 
chiefs in Scotland ; and close upon it, at once ter- 
rible and maddening to Protestant hearts, the 
tidings of the rising of the Catholics and of the 
massacre of the Protestants in Ireland. The king 
was innocent of the Irish rebellion ; it was simply 
a natural episode in the Irish land question. But 
he wrote to Secretary Nicholas, " I hope this ill 
news of Ireland will hinder some of those follies 
in England." 

It did not hinder the preparation of the Grand 
Kemonstrance. But a chivalrous royalist tried to 
hinder all the follies in a more practical way. A 
letter was one day delivered to Pym in the house 
by a messenger who had received it from a horse- 
man in grey. When it was opened, there dropped 
from it a rag which had been taken from a plague 
sore, and was of course full of infection. The 
writer intimated that, if this did not do the busi- 
ness, a surer weapon would be tried. A surer 
weapon, it seems, was tried, but it struck the 
wrong man. The world improves, though slow- 
ly. Then it was the stab of the assassin's 



Pym, 41 

dagger ; now it is only the stab of the assassin's 
tongue. 

And now the Grand Eemonstrance was ready. 
Manifestly drawn by Pym, it recites through a 
long series of clauses, but with monumental grav- 
ity and terseness, the grievances for which Par- 
liament had extorted redress, and concludes, in 
effect, by calling on the nation to support its 
leaders in making the work good against evil 
counselors and reaction. On the morning of 
the 23d of November, 1641, it lay engrossed 
upon the table of the House of Commons ; not 
the present House of Commons, as Mr. Forster re- 
minds us, but the narrow, ill-lighted, dingy room 
in which for centuries some of the world's most 
important work was done. And never, perhaps, 
did that old room, never did any hall of debate, 
witness such an oratoric struggle as the debate on 
the Grand Eemonstrance. The speakers were 
Pym, Hampden, Falkland, Hyde, Culpepper, Or- 
lando Bridgman, Denzil Hollis, "Waller, Glyn, 
Maynard, others of name. The stake was the 
revolution and the fortunes of all who were em- 
barked in it. Cromwell said that if they had lost 
he would have left England. The forces were by 
this time evenly balanced, for secession to the 
court had made great gaps in the patriot array, 
and in the royalist ranks were now seen not only 



42 Three English Statesmen. 

Digby, Hyde, Culpepper, "but Falkland — Falk- 
land, in whose house, the free resort of all learn- 
ing, a college, as his friend calls it, situated in a 
purer air, no small part, perhaps, of the intellect- 
ual elements of the revolution had been formed. 
There were many waverers whose votes were still 
to be lost or won. From noon to past midnight 
the battle raged ; for a battle it was of orators, 
not dictating pamphlets to the reporters, but grap- 
pling with each other for victory. The merest 
skeleton, alas! of the speeches alone remains. 
Pym rose when the debate was at its height, re- 
plying to the leaders on the king's side — Hyde, 
Falkland, Culpepper, and Sir Edward Dering. 
That the house was thinned by fatigue before the 
division has been proved to be a mistake ; though 
there were many trimmers who stayed away al- 
together. At midnight the Remonstrance was 
carried by eleven — 159 to 148. So charged was 
the air with the electricity of that fierce debate, 
that when the royalist Palmer attempted to pro- 
test, a tumult arose in which, as one who was 
present says, they had almost sheathed their 
swords in each others' breasts. In the following 
clays the exasperated majority proceeded to vio- 
lent measures against members of the minority. 
Let us never glorify revolution ! 

Now Charles arrived from Scotland, inflamed 



Pym. 43 

by contact with the fiery spirit of Montrose, and 
bringing the proofs he had sought of the com- 
plicity of the opposition leaders with the Scotch. 
He found the royalist reaction strong, many gained 
over by the queen, the students of the Temple hot 
in his favor, a royalist lord mayor, who got up 
for him an enthusiastic reception in the city. He 
was in an atmosphere of violence. Whitehall 
was thronged with disbanded officers and soldiers, 
ready at his command to fall on. The parliament, 
by a bold act of sovereign power, had raised for 
.itself a guard. Soon the names of Cavalier and 
Eoundhead were heard ; soon blood was shed, and 
the hand which unfolds the book of history turned 
the red page of civil war. The French queen, ig- 
norant that in England a nation lay behind the 
parliament, thought the time had come for crush- 
ing the ringleaders and stamping out the revolu- 
tion. Even now it seems Charles wavered be- 
tween two policies, and made some overtures to 
Pym. Then he gave ear to the queen and Digby, 
impeached the five members, and went himself, 
with an armed train, to seize them in the House 
of Commons. All know how the attempt was 
foiled; how Lady Carlyle — a storm-bird of this 
revolutionary storm, the political devotee first of 
Strafford, and when Strafford fell, of his conqueror 
— conveyed a warning to Pym ; how the queen 



44 Three English Statesmen. 

cried joyfully that the king was master again of 
his kingdom, and found that she had spoken too 
soon; how Charles entered the . House, looked 
toward the place, on the right hand near the bar, 
where Pym sat, found that he and all the " birds" 
were " flown ;" left the House amid cries of " Privi- 
lege f tried the city ; found there now, instead of 
an enthusiastic greeting, shouts of " To your tents, 
O Israel ;" and departed from Whitehall to return 
once more ; how the five members were brought 
back in triumph, " and," as Clarendon says, with 
an irony too near the truth, "set upon their 
thrones again ;" and how four thousand freehold- 
ers of Buckinghamshire rode up to protect their 
Hampden. Where are those four thousand free- 
holders of Buckinghamshire now ? And where 
then our English Hampden stood, speaking for 
English liberty, who stands now upholding mar- 
tial law as the suspension of all law ? 

Pym must now have seen that he had to con- 
duct a civil war. His first task w T as to strength- 
en the weak knees of the Lords. The special 
grievance of the Lords, the preference of upstart 
ecclesiastics to the great nobility in appointments 
to the offices of the State, had long ago been re- 
dressed ; they saw that matters were going too 
far for an aristocracy, and they had begun by 
their qualms greatly to disturb the unity of ac- 



Pym. 45 

tion. They liad thrown out the bill for taking 
away the votes of the "bishops. A great popular 
demonstration was got up against obstruction. 
Pyin carried the petitions of the people to the 
Lords, and backed them with a speech, in which he 
said that the Commons " would be sorry that the 
story of that parliament should tell posterity that 
in so great a danger and extremity the House of 
Commons should be enforced to save the king- 
dom alone." The Lords again showed tact ; 
they passed the bishops' bill with only three 
dissentient voices, and they also passed the bill 
giving Parliament the command of the militia. 

The passing of the bill for taking away the 
bishops' votes was a matter of vital necessity to 
Pym, who though himself, as has been said already, 
an Episcopalian, and the reverse of a fanatic, was 
thrown more and more, as the struggle went on 
and the moderates seceded, on the Presbyterians 
and the Independents. From the Independents 
we may be sure his cultivated statesmanship 
would shrink; but as a leader he must have 
noted that the unwavering courage and devotion 
of these men, their fixity of purpose, their terrible 
force, stood out more clearly as the sky darken- 
ed and the storm came on. Mirabeau marked 
the intensity of conviction which was to give ul- 
timate ascendancy to the chief of the Jacobins. 



46 Three English Statesmen. 

Pym may have marked the same thing in Crom- 
well. 

The final rupture between the king and the 
Commons took place on the demand of the par- 
liament for the control of the military forces of 
the kingdom. No doubt if Charles had yielded 
to this demand, nothing would have been left 
him but the name and state of a king. And 
yet while the king had the power of the sword, 
could a constitution which he desired to over- 
throw be secure % The question is not made less 
grave by the substitution of a standing army for 
a militia. It may one day present itself again. 
In truth it does partly present itself whenever 
an attempt is made to bring the Horse Guards 
under constitutional control. 

A pause ensues of eight months, during which 
all Englishmen are choosing their parts, all pre- 
paring for civil war ; the king's pursuivants and 
his commissions of array are being encountered 
by the commissioners and the ordinances of the 
parliament ; the old corselet and steel-cap, the 
old pike, and sword, and carbine are being taken 
down from the wall where they had hung since 
the time of the Armada; the hunter and the 
farm-horse are being trained to stand fire ; squad- 
rons of yeomen, battalions of burghers are being 
drilled by officers who had served under Gusta- 



Pym. v 47 

vus ; French and German engineers are organiz- 
ing the artillery; uniforms are being made for 
Newcastle's white-coats, Hampden's green-coats, 
Lord Saye's blue-coats, the City' of London's red- 
coats ; banners are being embroidered with mot- 
toes, loyal or patriotic ; friends who have taken 
opposite sides with sad hearts are waving a last 
farewell across the widening gulf to each other. 
Sir William Waller, the parliamentarian general, 
writes to his future antagonist, the royalist gen- 
eral, Sir Ralph Hopton — " My affections to you 
are so unchangeable, that hostility itself can not 
violate my friendship to your person ; but I must 
be true to the cause wherein I serve. The great 
God, who is the searcher of my heart, knows with 
what reluctance I go upon this service, and with 
what perfect hatred I look upon a war without 
an enemy. The God of peace in his good time 
send us peace, and in the mean time fit us to re- 
ceive it. We are both on the stage, and we 
must act the parts that are assigned us in this 
tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honor, and 
without personal animosities." Not only friend 
against friend, neighbor against neighbor, but 
father against son, son against father, brother 
against brother, women's hearts torn between the 
husband who fought on one side, the father and 
brother who fought on the other ; those who last 



48 Three English Statesmen, 

Christmas met round the same board, before next 
Christmas to meet in battle. If the High 
Church bishops and clergy were too roughly- 
handled, as unhappily they were, let it be re- 
membered that this was their war. It was truly 
called Bellum Episcopale. " I have eaten the 
king's bread," said Sir Edmund Verney, the 
king's standard-bearer, " near thirty years, and I 
will not do so base a thing as to forsake him. 
I choose rather to lose my life (which I am sure 
I shall do) to preserve and defend those things 
which are against my conscience to preserve and 
defend ; for I will deal freely with you, I have 
no reverence for the bishops, for whom this quar- 
rel subsists." Sir. Edmund's presentiment was 
true ; the first battle released him from this 
struggle between his conscience and his chivalry. 
Let it be noted, however, that the injunction 
of Sir William Waller was not unobserved. 
This war was on the whole carried on in a way 
of honor ; and if not without personal animosity, 
at least without the savage cruelty which has 
marked the civil wars of some nations. It was 
waged like a war of principle, like the war of a 
self-controlled and manly race. It was entered 
upon too, by the Commons at least, in the right 
spirit, as a most mournful necessity, with public 
humiliation and prayer. The play-houses were 



Pym. 49 

closed by an ordinance of the Parliament as in a 
time of national sorrow. These hypocrites, say 
royalists, knelt down to pray, and rose np again 
to shed innocent blood. And does not every re- 
ligions soldier, when he goes into battle, do the 
same? 

The king had now on his side almost all the 
nobility, most of the wealthier gentry, and the 
more backward parts of the country, in whicli 
the feudal tie between the land-owners and the 
peasantry was still strong ; such as the western 
counties, Wales, and part of the north. Of 
course he had the Episcopalian clergy, and the 
cathedral towns and universities which were un- 
der their influence. Oxford, once the intellect- 
ual head-quarters of Simon de Montfort, was now 
the head-quarters of Charles. The Koman Cath- 
olics also were with him ; he and they were in 
the same plot against liberty, though they did 
not yet quite understand each other. Pym and 
the Commons were strong in the more advanced 
and commercial districts, especially in the eastern 
counties. They had all the great towns, even 
those in the districts favorable to the enemy. 
'The town of Manchester," says Clarendon, 
" had from the beginning, out of that factious 
humor which possessed most corporations, and 

the pride of their wealth, opposed the king, and 

C 



5<3 Three English Statesmen. 

declared magisterially for the parliament." Bir- 
mingham, too, according to the same authority, 
" was of as great fame for hearty, willful, affected 
disloyalty to the king as any place in England?' 
London was the head-quarters ; not a London of 
warehouses at one end and Belgravias at the 
other, but a great city democracy, still warlike, 
as the conduct of the train-bands at Newbury 
proved, and devoted with heart and purse to the 
cause. Above all, the Commons had the lesser 
gentry and the independent yeomanry, every- 
where attached to the cause by its religious side. 
Those independent yeomanry, with high hearts 
and convictions of their own, who filled the ranks 
of the Ironsides, who conquered ,for English lib- 
erty at Marston, Naseby, and Worcester, in their 
native England are now seen no more. Here 
they have left a great, perhaps a fatal, gap in the 
ranks of freedom. But under Grant and Sher- 
man they still conquer for the good cause. 

Foreign powers stood neutral. Happily for 
us, Laud's desire of reunion with Rome had not 
been fulfilled, and the Anglican reaction in En- 
gland remained isolated from the Catholic reac- 
tion in the rest of Europe. The Anglican Pope 
could not stoop to submission, and Rome would 
hear of no compromise. To all offers of com- 
promise, to all offers of any thing but submission, 



Pym. 51 

she then said non possuvnus, and she says non 
possumus still. So the Catholic powers left 
Charles to the doom of a heretic prince, and 
when his head fell on the scaffold, took the op- 
portunity of buying his fine collection of works 
of art. Spain played her own game in Ireland ; 
and Richelieu throughout the whole of these 
transactions had been intriguing with the lead- 
ers of the Commons. The sympathies of the 
States of Holland were with the parliament, 
those of the House of Orange with the king. 

Standing army in those days there was none ; 
if there had been, Charles would have crushed 
liberty. The navy was on the side of the Com- 
mons. The sailors were inclined to Puritanism, 
and they were the sons of those who had fought 
against the Armada. 

The voice of the cannon was heralded by vol- 
leys of paper missiles from both sides. This is 
the stormy birth-hour of our newspaper press ; 
and it is instructive to see that, from the first, 
the party of " blood and culture" held its own 
in ruffianism and ribaldry. A statelier war 
of manifestoes meanwhile was waged between 
Pym in the name of the Commons, and Claren- 
don in the name of the king. Hallam thinks 
that Clarendon had the best of it. Mr. Forster 
scouts the idea. But I am of Hallam's mind. 



52 Three English Statesmem. 

Pyni is trying to make the parchment of legality 
cover a revolution ; and so stretched, the parch- 
ment cracks, as Clarendon does not fail to mark. 
Yet Pym was wise in presenting his cause as le- 
gally as possible to a law-loving people, who had 
not learned to think of law apart from a king. 
Nor does he fail to display his power, which lay 
especially in unmasking fallacies of principle. 
Hyde had argued that the king had as good a 
title to his town of Hull and its magazines, as 
any of his subjects had to their houses and lands, 
and that to dispose of the place without his con- 
sent would shake the foundations of property in 
general. " Here," replies Pym, " that is laid 
down for a principle which would indeed pull 
up the very foundation of the liberty, property, 
and interest of every subject in particular, and 
of all the subjects in general, if we should admit 
it for a truth that his majesty hath the same 
right and title to his towns and magazines 
(bought with the public money, as we conceive 
that at Hull to have been) that every particular 
man hath to his house, lands, and goods ; for his 
majesty's towns are no more his own than his 
people are his own ; and if the king had a prop- 
erty in all his towns, what would become of the 
subjects' property in their houses therein?" 

A provisional government of five peers and 



Pym. 53 

ten commoners was formed, under the name of 
the Committee of Safety, and installed at Derby 
House. At its head was Pym. Hampden went 
down to his county to muster his yeomen, and 
to second and perhaps watch Essex, a military 
grandee of rather lukewarm sentiments, though 
honorable and trustworthy, whom it was thought 
politic to make commander-in-chief. Pym in his 
youth had been in the Exchequer ; and the 
Chancellorship of the Exchequer was the office 
destined for him when he and his friends were 
on the point of forming a government. He now 
used his financial knowledge to organize the 
finance of the Commons in the way of regular 
taxation extending over all the districts in their 
power, to the envy of Clarendon, whose side was 
supplied only by irregular contributions and by 
the rapine, as wasteful as it was odious, of Ku- 
pert. " One side," says Clarendon, mournfully, 
"seemed to fight for monarchy with the weapons 
of confusion, and the other to destroy the king 
and government with all the principles and regu- 
larity of monarchy." 

Toward the end of October, 1642, whatever 
there may have been on Pym's brow, deep care 
must have been in his heart, for the king was 
moving southward on London, Essex was wait- 
ing on his march, and a battle was at hand. 



54 Three English Statesmen. 

Accordingly, on Monday, the 24th, came first, 
borne on the wings of fear, the news of the great 
defeat ; then better news, then worse news again ; 
then Lord Wharton and Mr. Strode from the army, 
with authentic tidings of the doubtful victory 
of Edgehill. Edgehill, the king's evening halt- 
ing-place, looks out from the brow of the high ta- 
ble-land on a wide champaign ; and immediately 
below lies the little town of Keynton, the even- 
ing halting-place of Essex. Between Edgehill and 
Keynton is a wood called the Graves, the burial- 
place of five thousand Englishmen slain by En- 
glish hands, among them it was said of a soldier 
to whom death was made more bitter by the 
thought that he had fallen by the carbine, in 
vain avoided, of his brother. There, on the Sab- 
bath day, October 23, Roundhead and Cavalier 
first tried the bitter taste of civil war. From 
two o'clock till nightfall the plain between Edge- 
hill foot and Keynton was filled with the wild 
and confused eddies of a battle fought by raw 
troops under inexperienced commanders. The ac- 
tion was, however, a sort of epitome of the war. 
It began with the desertion to the enemy of a 
body of Parliamentary horse under Fortescue, 
named by his sponsors, in prophetic irony, Sir 
Faithful. Rupert with his cavalry carried all be- 
fore him, rode headlong off in pursuit, and return- 



Pym. 55 

ed with his wearied horsemen to find the Parlia- 
mentary infantry in possession of the field, and 
the king's person in great danger. The army of 
the Commons was enabled to hold its ground 
that night and the next day, and thus to gain 
the semblance of a victory — a semblance which 
was the saving of the cause — by the zeal of the 
country people, who eagerly brought them pro- 
visions, while the king's soldiers, when they went 
out to forage, were knocked upon the head. 
But as yet there was no Cromwell in command, 
and the serving-men and tapsters in the army 
were too many, the Ironsides were too few, as in 
the Federal army at Bull's Kun there was too 
much of New York and too little of Illinois. 
Edgehill was, in fact, our Bull's Run. The panic 
of the Parliamentary horse at the first charge of 
the Cavaliers was shameful. Some must have 
fied still earlier, if there be any truth in Claren- 
don's statement that though the battle began so 
late, runaways, and not only common soldiers, 
but officers of rank, were in St. Albans before 
night-fall. If the Times' s correspondent had been 
there, he would certainly have reported that En- 
glishmen would not fight. Our natio'n, like the 
American nation of late, had to go through great- 
er trials, and be thrown more upon its nobler 
self, before it could deserve victory. 



56 Three English Statesmen. 

The Commons voted Essex £5,000 for his 
success. But meanwhile the king was taking 
Banbury, and in a fortnight he was before Lon- 
don. The Commons^had gone into the conflict, 
like the people of the Northern States, full of 
overweening confidence in their superior numbers 
and resources, and ignorant of the bitterness of 
war. They had now found to their cost that an 
aristocracy and its dependents, used, the masters 
to command and the servants to obey, have a 
great advantage over a democracy in the field, 
till the democracy have learned the higher dis- 
cipline of intelligent submission to command for 
the sake of their own course. From the pinna- 
cle of exaltation they fell into the depth of dis- 
couragement ; and the thirteen months of life 
which remained to Pym were months of incessant 
struggle against despondency, defection, and dis- 
aster. The peers soon began to fall away. The 
few members of the Upper House who stayed at 
Westminster were a perpetual source of timid 
councils. Essex himself, though he kept his 
faith, felt the bias of his order; he was at best 
far from a great general, and his operations in 
the field were apt to be affected by fits of politi- 
cal moderation. The fortune of war was on the 
whole decidedly in favor of the king. The 
Fairfaxes were defeated at Atherton. Sir Wil- 



Pym. 57 

liam Waller, after the brief career of victory 
which gained him the nickname of William 
the Conqueror, met with a bloody and decisive 
overthrow at Roundway Down. Bristol was 
surrendered by Fiennes, the only notable instance 
of a want of military courage among these lead- 
ers who, many of them so late in life, had 
changed peaceful arts for war. Only in the asso- 
ciation of the eastern counties, where Cromwell 
fought under Lord Mandeville, the light of hope 
still shone. The discovery of the plot formed by 
Waller, who had been a leading patriot in the 
debate on the Grand Remonstrance, to deliver 
London to the king, revealed the abyss on the 
edge of which the leaders of the Commons stood. 
A mob of women, and women in men's clothes, 
came to the House of Commons, calling for the 
traitor Pym, and it was necessary to disperse 
them with cavalry. Hampden, Pym's second 
self, and the second pillar of the cause, fell in a 
petty skirmish on Chalgrove Field. Yet Pym 
seems to have remained master of the burning 
vessel, tossed as she was upon a raging sea. 
He managed the war, kept watch against conspir- 
acy, held together the discordant and wavering 
party in Parliament, sustained by his eloquence 
the enthusiasm of the city. Unable to quell the 

tendency of the peace party to treat, he adroitly 

C2 



58 Three English Statesmen. 

fell in with it ; went down himself to the city, 
which had become infuriated at the report of 
negotiations, to vindicate the character of the 
Parliainet, and thus remaining master of the 
negotiations, prevented them- from degenerating 
into surrender. While the king, made confident 
by success, was issuing proclamations promising 
pardon to all but leading rebels, Pym daringly 
impeached the queen for the part which she was 
taking in the war. The queen was not in his 
hands, nor likely to be ; and if she had been she 
would have been safe. The move was intended 
only to commit Parliament past recall, and to 
hurl defiance at the king. The Presbyterians 
were secured by the appointment of the Assem- 
bly of Divines to reform the Church after their 
model. But it is evident that the free nature of 
Pym, and the free natures of other men like 
Pym, struggled hard and long before they could 
consent to bow their necks to the yoke of the 
Calvinistic covenant, on which condition alone 
the aid, now indispensable, could be obtained 
from the Scotch. 

The tide still ran for the king. Gloucester, 
the last stronghold of the Commons in the west, 
was in peril. Essex had sent to the Houses 
proposals for an accommodation, the rejection of 
which Pym and St. John, by their utmost efforts, 



Pym. 59 

could only just procure. Then Pym went down 
to the tent of Essex, tried on the moody and 
jealous aristocrat the powers of persuasion which 
had carried the Grand Eemonstrance, and tried 
them not in vain. Essex marched: Gloucester 
was relieved; the king was worsted at New- 
bury ; and a ray of victory breaking from the 
cloud, shone upon Pym's last hour. 

Work tells upon the sensitive organizations 
of men of genius. Pym had been working, as 
the preacher of his funeral sermon tells us, from 
three in the morning till evening, and from even- 
ing again till midnight. He must have borne a 
crushing weight of anxiety besides. The loath- 
some fables invented by the royalists are not 
needed to account for the failure of his health. 
He met his end, if we may trust the report of 
his friends, with perfect calmness. At the last, 
we are told, he fell into a swoon, and when he 
recovered his consciousness, seeing his friends 
weeping round him, he told them that he had 
looked death in the face, and therefore feared not 
the worst he could do ; added some words of re- 
ligious hope and comfort ; and, while a minister 
was praying with him, quietly slept with God. 
Funeral sermons are not history. No character 
is flawless, least of all the characters of men who 
lead in violent times. But if the cause of En- 



6o Three English Statesmen. 

glish liberty was a good cause, Pym's conscience, 
so far as we can see, might well bid Mm turn 
calmly to his rest. 

The King of the Commons was "buried with 
the utmost pomp and magnificence in the resting- 
place of kings. The body was borne from 
Derby House to Westminster Abbey by ten of 
the leading members of the House of Commons, 
followed by both Houses of Parliament in full 
mourning, by the Assembly of Divines, and by 
many gentlemen of quality, with two heralds of 
arms before the corpse bearing the crest of the 
deceased. This last piece of state shows how 
near we still are to feudalism, how far from the 
Sans-culottes. Ten thousand pounds were voted 
to pay Pym's debts, a proof that he had not 
grown rich by the public service. No doubt he 
had been obliged to keep some state and hos- 
pitality, as head of the provisional government, 
at Derby House. A pension was also voted to his 
son, who bore arms for the Parliament, but after 
the Kestoration sank into a baronetcy — one 
proof among many that public virtue is not 
hereditary and that its titles ought not to be so. 
Nor did Oxford fail in its way to do honor to 
the departed chief. The news of Pym's death 
had been long eagerly expected there, and when 
it arrived, bonfires were lighted, and there was 



Pym, 6 1 

high carousing among the Cavaliers. He was 
gone, the man most needful to the common- 
wealth, and, as it seemed, at the hour of her 
utmost need. But before he went he had turned 
the tide, and he bequeathed victory to his cause. 
Had Pym lived and remained master of the 
movement, what would have been the result ? 
Into what port did he mean to steer his revolu- 
tion ? To have embarked on the sea of civil war 
without a port in view would not have been the 
part of a great man. The indications are very 
slight in themselves ; but taken with the circum- 
stances and the reason of the case, they may per- 
haps amount to probability. If my surmise is 
right, Pym would have preserved the monarchy, 
he would not have changed the family, but he 
would have changed the king. He would have 
put the king's nephew, Prince Charles Louis, the 
eldest son of the Protestant heroine, Elizabeth 
Queen of Bohemia, on the English throne. The 
prince, unlike his brothers Rupert and Maurice, 
had shown sympathy with the Commons, and he 
was received at London with much state just 
about the time when Pym died. English histo- 
ry presented to Pym's historic mind more than 
one example of such a change of king. Thus he 
would have done in 1643 what was afterward 
done in 1688, but he would probably have done 



62 Three English Statesmen. 

it with a stronger and more statesman-like hand, 
less in the interest of the aristocracy and the 
hierarchy, and more in the interest of the nation. 
At the Restoration, Pyra's body was torn, 
under a royal warrant, from its tomb, and 
thrown with the bodies of other rebels below 
the rank of regicide into a pit in the adjoin- 
ing church-yard. The great man of the heroic 
age lies not beside the parliamentary tacticians 
whom our age calls great. As you stand on 
the north side of the nave of St. Margaret's 
Church, where some canons' houses once were, 
your feet are on the dust of Pym, of Blake and 
Dean, of Strode, of May the parliamentary histo- 
rian, of Twiss the Prolocutor of the Assembly 
of Divines, of Dorislaus the martyred envoy of 
the Commonwealth, of Cromwell's mother, whom 
also the chivalry and piety of the Restoration 
tore out of her grave. Hampden had fallen and 
been buried in his own county, or his dust too 
would be there. In the vestibule of that vast 
and sumptuous but feebly conceived and effem- 
inately ornamented pile, no unmeet shrine of 
Plutocracy, the present House of Commons, 
stand on either hand the statues of parliamentary 
worthies. Pym is not there. Ignorance proba- 
bly it is that has excluded the foremost worthy 
of the mall. Pym does not look down on the 



Pym. 63 

men who now fill the house which once he led : 
nor do they read on the pedestal of his statue 
the moral of his political life — "The best form 
of government is that which doth actuate and 
dispose every part and member of a state to the 
common good." But Pym has a statue in histo- 
ry, and seldom has there been more need for un- 
veiling it than now. 










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CROMWELL 




II. 

CROMWELL. 

I have called my subject " Cromwell." I 
ought, perhaps, rather to have called it the Pro- 
tectorate. For to that part of Cromwell's life 
what I have to say will be almost entirely con- 
fined. I speak of him not as a general, or as a 
party leader, but as a prince. 

In the early debates on religion, amid the great 
orators of the Parliaments of Charles, there had 
stood up a gentleman farmer of Huntingdonshire, 
a fervent Puritan, with power on his brow and in 
his frame, with enthusiasm, genius, even the ten- 
derness of genius in his eye; but in a dress which 
scandalized young courtiers, and with an unmu- 
sical voice, his sentences confused, his utterance 
almost choked by the vehemence of his emotion. 
On him God had not bestowed the gift of soul- 
enthralling words ; his eloquence was the thun- 
der of victory. 

Victory went with him where he fought, when 
she had deserted the standards of all the other 



68 Three English Statesmen. 

chiefs of his party. Hope shone in him " as a 
pillar of fire," when her light had gone out in all 
other men. He came to the front rank from the 
moment when debating was over, and the time 
arrived for organizing war. From the first he 
rightly conceived the condition of success — a sol- 
diery of yeomen fearing God, fearing nothing else, 
submitting themselves for the sake of their cause 
to a rigid discipline, as the only match for the 
impetuous chivalry of the Cavaliers : and his con- 
ception was embodied in the Ironsides. Marston 
crowns the first period of his career. It was won 
by the discipline of his men. Then came the 
struggle between his party, who wished to con- 
quer, and the Presbyterians, who but half wished 
to conquer, who by this time hated the sectaries 
in their own ranks more than the common enemy, 
and whose aristocratic leaders now saw plainly 
that the revolution was going beyond the objects 
of an aristocracy, and that it was likely to do too 
much for the people. The Self-denying Ordi- 
nance set aside the Presbyterian commanders. It 
included in its operation Cromwell. But Fair- 
fax desired him, before he resigned his command, 
to perform one service more ; and it was felt, as 
it could not fail to be felt, that to part with him 
was to part with victory. This, as far as I can 
see, not any intrigue of his, is the true account of 



Cromwell. 69 

Lis retention in command. Naseby was won by 
him with his new model army; it made him the 
first man in England ; though since Marston the 
adverse factions had been viewing his rising 
greatness with a jealous eye, and vainly plotting 
his overthrow. Then came the captivity and the 
death of the king, with the interlude of Hamil- 
ton's Scotch invasion, and the victory of Preston, 
gained in Cromwell's fashion, which was not to 
manoeuvre, but to train his men well, march 
straight to his enemy, and fight a decisive battle 
— a fashion natural perhaps to one who had not 
studied the science of strategy, but at the same 
time merciful, since no brave men perished other- 
wise than in fight, the loss of life was compara- 
tively small, the results immense. Cromwell is 
now the general of the Commonwealth : he con- 
quers Ireland; he conquers Scotland; the "crown- 
ing mercy" of Worcester puts supreme power 
within his grasp. After a pause, he makes him- 
self Protector. 

There are two points, dark spots as I think 
them, in his career on which I must dwell to pay 
a tribute to morality. The execution of the king 
is treated by cynical philosophy in its usual strain : 
"This action of the English regicides did in effect 
strike a damp like death through the heart of 
flunkeyism universally in this world; whereof 



70 Three English Statesmen, 

flunkeyism, cant, cloth - worship, and whatever 
other ugly name it have, has gone about incurably 
sick ever since, and is now at length in these gen- 
erations very rapidly dying." This is not the 
tone in which the terrible but high-souled fanat- 
ics who did it would have spoken of their own 
deed. They at least so far respected the feelings 
of mankind, or rather their own feelings, as to 
drape the scaffold with black. Cromwell would 
have saved the king; he would probably have 
made terms with him, and, if he could have trust- 
ed him, set him again upon his throne. Himself 
a most tender husband and father, he had seen 
Charles amid his family, and had been touched. 
But Charles could not see that he was fallen ; his 
anointed kingship was still fact-proof. He tried 
to play off one of the two contending parties 
against the other when it was a matter of life 
and death to them both. Cromwell discovered 
his duplicity. He then tried to frighten Charles 
out of the kingdom, by sending him an intima- 
tion at Hampton Court that there were designs 
against his life. Charles fled from Hampton 
Court, but, his flight being mismanaged, he be- 
came a prisoner in the Isle of Wight. There he 
negotiated with the Parliament, in which the ene- 
mies of Cromwell and the Independents were 
still strong. At the same time he was carrying 



Cromwell. 7 1 

on the intrigues with the Royalist faction which 
produced the rising in Kent and the invasion of 
England by Hamilton. Before the army march- 
ed against Hamilton, the officers, exasperated at 
having their lives and their cause thus again put 
in peril, after so many bloody fields, by the du- 
plicity of the king, held a prayer-meeting at 
Windsor, and there resolved — " That it was their 
duty, if ever the Lord brought them back in 
peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, 
to an account for the blood he had shed and the 
mischief he had done to his utmost against the 
Lord's cause and the people in these poor na- 
tions." They had before them a precedent in the 
case of Mary Stuart. When they returned vic- 
torious, they signed a petition " for justice and a 
settlement of the kingdom." Cromwell sends the 
petition to Fairfax, with a letter, saying, that he 
finds among the officers of his regiment a great 
sense of the sufferings of the kingdom, and a 
great zeal to have impartial justice done upon of- 
fenders. He adds that he does himself from his 
heart concur with them, and believes that God 
has put these things into their hearts. Thus the 
king was brought to trial and to the scaffold. 
This, so far as I can see, is the real account of 
Charles's death, and of Cromwell's share in it. 
Of Cromwell's own, there is, touching this the 



72 Three English Statesmen. 

gravest and most questionable act of his life, no 
recorded word. He does not touch on it in his 
speeches or his letters ; he appears not to have 
touched on it in conversation with his friends. 
Never did a man more completely carry his se- 
cret with him to the grave. That the execution 
of the king was a fatal error of policy is a thing 
so clear to us, that we can scarcely suppose one 
so sagacious as Cromwell to have been altogether 
blind to it ; and it is, therefore, reasonable to 
suppose that his course was determined not by 
policy, but by sympathy with the feelings of his 
soldiers. The fierce and hard Old Testament 
sentiments which were in their hearts were in 
his heart too. Nothing, unhappily, can be less 
true than that the act of the regicides struck a 
damp through the heart of fiunkeyism, or that 
flunkeyisni has gone about incurably sick of it 
ever since. It is liberty, if any thing, that has 
gone about sick of it. The blood of the royal 
martyr has been the seed of flunkeyism from that 
day to this. What man, what woman, feels any 
sentimental attachment to the memory of James 
II. ? There would have been less attachment, if 
possible, to the memory of the w T eak and perfid- 
ious Charles, if his weakness and his perfidy had 
not been glorified by his death. 

The other point is the slaughter of the garri- 



Cromwell. y ? 

sons of Drogheda and Wexford. Here again the 
cynical philosophy, which from a satiety as it 
seems, of civilization we are beginning to affect 
exults in the blow dealt to what it calls false 
philanthropy, rose-water, universal pardon and 
benevolence. It is to be hoped that these phi- 
losophers will, as soon as possible, tell us what 
philanthropy is not false, lest we should all be- 
come brutes together. The war in Ireland had 
been on both sides a war of extermination. The 
Catholics had begun it by a great massacre of 
the Protestants, on the reality or the atrocity of 
which it seems to me idle to cast a doubt, though 
assuredly if such deeds could ever be pardoned, 
they might be pardoned in a people so deeply 
wronged, so brutalized by oppression, as the 
Catholics of Ireland then were. These very gar- 
risons had taken part, or were believed to have 
taken part, in cruelties worse than those com- 
mitted by Nana Sahib. The feeling of English 
Protestants against the Papist rebels of Ireland, 
which of course Cromwell could not help shar- 
ing, was at least as strong as that of English- 
men in our own time against the Indian muti- 
neers. Cromwell summoned both places to sur- 
render, with an implied offer of mercy, before he 
stormed. The laws of war in those days were 
far less humane and chivalrous than they are 



74 Three English Statesmen. 

now : the garrison of a place taken by storm was 
not held to have a right to quarter. The Cath- 
olic hero, Count Tilly, had put not only the garri- 
son but the inhabitants of the great Protestant 
city of Magdeburg to the sword ; and the same 
thing had been done by Alva and other generals 
on the Catholic side. Cromwell says in his dis- 
patch : " I am persuaded that this is a righteous 
judgment of God upon these wretches, who have 
imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood ; 
and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of 
blood for the future, which are the satisfactory 
grounds to such actions, which otherwise can not 
but work remorse and regret." This excuse is 
not sufficient, if any innocent persons were in- 
volved in the slaughter ; no excuse can be suffi- 
cient for the shedding of innocent blood on any 
occasion or under any pretense, except in fair bat- 
tle. But it is at all events the excuse of a moral 
and reasonable being. "Burst thou wed the 
heaven's lightning and say to it, Godlike one V 
This, I think, is the excuse of one who, under the in- 
fluence of a literary theory, has for the moment di- 
vested himself of his morality and of his reason too. 
We pass on then to the Protectorate. Great 
questions concerning both the Church and the 
State are still open ; and till they are settled the 
judgment of history on Cromwell can scarcely be 



Cromwell. 75 

fixed. To some the mention of his reign still re- 
calls a transient domination of the powers of 
evil breaking through the divine order of the 
political and ecclesiastical world. Others regard 
his policy as a tidal wave, marking the line to 
which the waters will once more advance, and 
look upon him as a ruler who was before his 
hour, and whose hour perhaps is now come. 
Here we must take for granted the goodness of 
his cause, and ask only whether he served it faith- 
fully and well. 

Of his genius there is little question. Claren- 
don himself could not be blind to the fact that 
such a presence as that of this Puritan soldier 
had seldom been felt upon the scene of history. 
Necessity, "who will have the man and not the 
shadow," had chosen him from among his fellows 
and placed her crown upon his brow. I say 
again let us never glorify revolution ; let us not 
love the earthquake and the storm more than the 
regular and beneficent course of nature. Yet 
revolutions send capacity to the front with vol- 
canic force across all the obstacles of envy and of 
class. It was long before law-loving England 
could forgive one who seemed to have set his 
foot on law ; but there never perhaps was a time 
when she was not at heart proud of his glory, 
when she did not feel safer beneath the aegis of 



j 6 Three English Statesmen, 

his victorious name. As often as danger threat- 
ens us, the thought returns, not that we may 
have again a Marlborough or a Black Prince ; 
but that the race which produced Cromwell may, 
at its need, produce his peer, and that the spirit 
of the Great Usurper may once more stand forth 
in arms. 

Of Cromwell's honesty there is more doubt. 
And who can hope, in so complex a character, 
to distinguish accurately the impulses of ambi- 
tion from those of devotion to a cause? Who 
can hope, across two centuries, to pierce the secret 
\ of so deep a heart % We must not trust the en- 
vious suggestions of such observers as Ludlow or 
even Whitelocke. Suspicions of selfish ambition 
attend every rise, however honest, however in- 
evitable, from obscurity to power. Through " a 
cloud not of war only but detraction rude, 1 ' the 
11 chief of men" had " ploughed his glorious way 
to peace and truth." These witnesses against 
him are not agreed among themselves. Ludlow 
is sure that Cromwell played the part of an arch- 
hypocrite in pressing Fairfax to command the 
army of Scotland ; but Mrs. Hutchinson is sure 
that though he was an arch-hypocrite on other 
occasions, on this he was sincere. After the 
death of the king, after the conquest of Ireland, 
when the summit of his ambition must have been 



Cromwell. J J 

full in his view, he married his eldest son Eich- 
ard to the daughter of a private gentleman, bar- 
gaining anxiously though not covetously about 
the settlement, and caring, it seems, for nothing 
so much as that the family with which the con- 
nection was formed should be religious. Can 
Eichard have been then, in his father's mind, heir 
to a crown ? 

Cromwell was a fanatic, and all fanatics are 
morally the worse for their fanaticism : they set | 
dogma above virtue, they take their own ends for 
God's ends, and their own enemies for His. But 
that this man's religion was sincere .who can 
doubt ? It not only fills his most private letters, 
as well as 'his speeches and dispatches, but it is 
the only clue to his life. For it, when past forty, 
happy in his family, well to do in the world, he 
turned out with his children and exposed his life 
to sword and bullet in obscure skirmishes as well 
as in glorious fields. On his death-bed his 
thoughts wandered not like those of Napoleon 
among the eddies of battle or in the mazes of 
state-craft, but among the religions questions of 
his youth. Constant hypocrisy would have been 
fatal to his decision. The double-minded man is 
unstable in all his ways. This man was not un- 
stable in any of his ways: his course is as 
straight as that of a great force of nature. There 



78 Three English Statesmen. 

is something not only more than animal, but 
more than natural in his courage. If fanatics so 
often beat men of the world in council, it is part- 
ly because they throw the die of earthly destiny 
with a steady hand as those whose great treas- 
ure is not here. 

Walking amid such perils, not of sword and 
bullet only, but of envious factions and intrigu- 
ing enemies on every side, it was impossible that 
Cromwell should not contract a wariness, and 
perhaps more than a wariness of step. It was 
impossible that his character should not in some 
measure reflect the darkness of his time. In es- 
tablishing his government he had to feel his way, 
to sound men's dispositions, to conciliate different 
interests ; and these are processes not favorable to 
simplicity of mind, still less favorable to the ap- 
pearance of it, yet compatible with general hon- 
esty of purpose. As to what is called his hyp- 
ocritical use of Scriptural language, ScrijDtural 
language was his native tongue. In it he spoke 
to his wife and children, as well as to his armies 
and his Parliaments : it burst from his lips when 
he saw victory at Dunbar : it hovered on them in 
death, when policy, and almost consciousness, was 
gone. 

He said that he would gladly have gone back 
to private life. It is incredible that he should 



Cromwell. 79 

have formed the design, perhaps not incredible 
that he should have felt the desire. Nature no 
doubt with high powers gives the wish to use 
thern; and it must be bitter for one who knows 
that he can do great things, to pass away before 
great things have been done. But when great 
things have been done for a great end on an 
illustrious scene, the victor of Naseby, Dunbar, 
and Worcester, the saviour of a nation's cause, 
may be ready to welcome the evening hour of 
memory and repose, especially if, like Cromwell, 
he has a heart full of affection and a happy home. 
Of the religion of hero-worship I am no dev- 
otee. Great men are most precious gifts of heav- 
en, and unhappy is the nation which can not pro- 
duce them at its need. But their importance 
in history becomes less as civilization goes on. 
A Timour or an Attila towers unapproachably 
above his horde : but in the last great struggle 
which the world has seen, the Cromwell was not 
a hero, but an intelligent and united nation. 
And to whatever age they may belong, the great- . 
est, the most godlike of men, are men, not gods. 
They -are the offspring, though the highest off- 
spring, of their age. They would be nothing 
without their fellow-men. Did Cromwell escape 
the intoxication of power which has turned the 
brains of other favorites of fortune, and bear him- 



80 Three English Statesmen. 

self always as one who held the government as a 
trust from God ? It was because he was one of 
a religious people. Did he, amid the temptations 
of arbitrary rule, preserve his reverence for law, 
and his desire to reign under it % It was because 
he was one of a law-loving people. Did he, in 
spite of fearful provocation, show on the whole 
remarkable humanity \ It was because he was 
one of a brave and humane people. A somewhat 
larger share of the common qualities — this, and 
this alone it was which, circumstances calling him 
to a great trust, had raised him above his fellows. 
The impulse which lent vigor and splendor to 
his government came from a great movement, not 
from a single man. The Protectorate with its 
glories was not the conception of a lonely intel- 
lect, but the revolutionary energy of a mighty na- 
tion concentrated in a single chief. 

I can never speak of Mr. Carlyle without pay- 
ing grateful homage to the genius which pro- 
duced the " French Revolution." That work is 
his best, partly perhaps because it is free from a 
hero. His " Cromwell" is hero-worshijD, and 
therefore it is not true ; but like the alchemists 
who made real chemical discoveries while they 
were in search of their visionary gold, though he 
has failed to reveal a god, he has not failed to help 
us in our study of the character of a great man. 



Cromwell. 8 1 

Carlyle prostrates morality before greatness. 
His imitators prostrate it before mere force, 
which is no more adorable than mere fraud, the 
force of those who are physically weak. We 
might as well bow down before the hundred- 
handed idol of a Hindoo. To moral force we 
may bow down : but moral force resides and can 
reside in those only whose lives embody the mor- 
al law. It is found in the highest degree in 
those at whom hero-worship sneers. Hero-wor- 
ship sneers at Falkland : yet Falkland by his 
purity and his moderation has touched and influ- 
enced the hearts of his countrymen forever. We 
shall come to the vulgar worship of success, and 
be confounded with those who look upon mis- 
fortune as the judgment of heaven upon the van- 
quished, li The judgment of heaven was upon 
them, sir," said a Tory bishop, speaking of the 
regicides, to Quin ; " the Judgment of heaven was 
'upon them— almost all of them came to violent 
ends." " So, my lord," replied Quin, " did almost 
all the Apostles." What makes us men, not 
brutes, if it is not that we reverence ourselves, 
and listen to the god in our own breasts, instead 
of blindly following the animal whom victory in 
a conflict of force has marked out as the leader 
of our herd ? 

Neither force do I worship in Cromwell nor 

D2 



82 Three English Statesmen. 

arbitrary power. Milton was no Imperialist, no 
admirer of the Caesars, no apologist of Nero. I 
hope to show some ground for thinking that ar- 
bitrary power was not dear to Cromwell's heart. 
He was great enough, if I mistake not, and felt 
himself great enough, to reign among the free. 
An ignoble nature like that of Bonaparte may 
covet despotism. A noble nature never cared for 
the affection of a dependent or for the obedience 
of a slave. 

When a revolution is over, a government must 
be founded at once to gather in the fruits and to 
heal the wounds of the struggle. And the only 
men who can found it are those who remain mas- 
ters of the revolution. The man who remained 
master of the English Revolution was the victor 
of Worcester. The conquest of the Royalists 
was not his only service, or his only claim to su- 
preme power. In the English, as afterward in 
the French Revolution, the fountains of the social 
deep had at last been broken uj), and terrible 
forms of anarchy had begun to appear. Crom- 
well had quelled anarchy as well as tyranny. 
With a promptness and an integrity which go 
far toward proving his paramount devotion to 
the public good, as well as with a courage, moral 
and personal, which has never been surpassed, 
and at the same time with a merciful economy of 



Cromwell. 83 

punishment which shows how different is the 
vigor of the brave from the vigor of the savage, 
he had confronted and put down the great mu- 
tiny of the Levellers. He had thus perhaps 
saved England from a reign of terror. And they 
were no Parisian street mob, these insurgents 
with whom he had to deal, nor were their leaders 
the declaimers of the Jacobin Club. They were 
the best soldiers that ever trod a field of battle, 
the soldiers who had gained his own victories, 
led by men of desperate courage, and fighting for 
a cause in which they were reckless of their lives. 
The decimated remnant of the Long Parliament 
was not a government. It was a Eevolutionary 
Assembly.^ It had lost the character of a govern- 
ment when it deposed and beheaded the king 
who had called it ; when it abolished the other 
house, which was as essential a part of a legal 
parliament as itself; when it was reduced to a 
fourth of its legal number by Pride's Purge and 
other violent acts of the revolution. Nor was 
it fit to become the government, though this was 
its aim. Eevolutionary assemblies, while the 
struggle lasts and egotism is subdued by danger, 
often display not only courage, energy and con- 
stancy, but remarkable self-control. So sometimes 
do revolutionary mobs. But the struggle over, 
the tendencies to faction, intrigue, tyranny, and 



84 Three English Statesmen. 

corruption begin to appear. The services of the 
Long Parliament as a Revolutionary Assembly 
had been immense ; its name will be held in hon- 
or while English liberty endures. But when it 
was victorious and aspired to be the government, 
its rule was the tyranny of a section, insufferable 
to the great body of the nation. It was a dom- 
inant faction, maintaining itself in power by daily 
violence, prolonging all the evils and imperiling 
all the fruits of the revolution. In finance it was 
subsisting by revolutionary expedients, by the 
sale of public property, and what was much worse, 
by confiscation. Its office for sequestration in 
Haberdasher's Hall was crowded every day with 
the trembling victims of its cruel deeds. It had 
superseded the regular courts of justice by a rev- 
olutionary 'tribunal which had put a man to death 
for having acted as the emissary of Charles II. at 
Constantinople. In foreign policy it was running 
wild. It wanted to annex the Dutch Republic, 
and when it was thwarted in that chimerical 
scheme it plunged the two Protestant nations into 
a fratricidal and disastrous war. That it showed 
in the conduct of that war great Republican vig- 
or, and by the hand of Vane created a navy with 
marvelous rapidity, was but a slight compensa- 
tion for so calamitous an error. The measure by 
which it was preparing to perpetuate its own ex- 



Cromwell. 85 

istence was as much a usurpation as the assump- 
tion of supreme power by Cromwell. And yet 
what could it do without a permanent head of the 
State ? Had it issued writs for a Free Parliament 
and dissolved, it would not only have committed 
suicide itself, but have plunged the nation into an 
abyss of anarchy and confusion. 

Cromwell was set up by the army : whence an 
outcry against a government of musketeers and 
pikemen. A government of musketeers and pike- 
men is the greatest of calamities and the deepest 
of degradations ; and how to escape the danger 
of such government, which threatens all European 
nations in their critical transition from the feudal 
aristocracy of the past to the democracy of the fu- 
ture, is now a pressing question for us all. But 
the soldiers of Cromwell were not mere musket- 
eers and pikemen. They were not like the le- 
gionaries of Caesar and the grenadiers of Napole- 
on, raising the idol of the camp to a despotic 
throne. They were the best of English citizens 
in arms for the nation's cause ; and when all was 
over with the cause, they became the best of En- 
glish citizens again. Through them the Involu- 
tion had conquered ; they in truth were the Rev- 
olution. They had no right, and they had as lit- 
tle inclination, to set up a military tyranny ; but 
they had a right to give a chief to the State and 



86 Three English Statesmen. 

to support the government of the chief whom they 
had given. It was in fact upon them and their 
general, not upon the nation or any considerable 
party in it, that the Parliament itself rested, and 
they and their general were accordingly responsi- 
ble for its acts and for the continuance of its 
power. 

Nor was the chief whom they gave to the na- 
tion a Caesar ; much less was he a Bonaparte, an 
unprincipled soldier of fortune vaulting on the 
back of a Revolution to make himself an emperor. 
The relation of Cromwell to the English Revolu- 
tion was not that of a Napoleon, but, if it is not 
blasphemy to mention the two names together, 
that of a Robespierre. The chief of the Rous- 
seauists was the leader of the most religious and 
the deepest part of the French movement, though 
shallow was the deepest. Cromwell was in like 
manner himself the leader and embodiment of the 
most religious and the deepest part of the English 
movement. He was Puritanism armed and in 
power, not the successful general of a foreign war. 
I say that in the case alike of the English and of 
the French Revolution the most religious part of 
the movement was the deepest part. The most 
religious part of all movements is the deepest part. 
Beneath these social and political revolutions 
which are now going on around us, and which 



Cromwell, Sy 

seem to move society so deeply, do we not per- 
ceive, deeper than all, a revolution in religion — a 
revolution which may one day clothe itself in 
some form of power and cast the world again in a 
new mold ? 

The form of government which Cromwell meant 
to found was a monarchy, with himself as mon- 
arch. I do not doubt that this was his design 
from the time when he took supreme power into 
his hands. But it was not to be a Stuart mon 
archy. It was to be a Constitutional and a Prot 
estant monarchy, with Parliamentary government 
Parliamentary taxation, reform of the representa 
tion, an enlightened and vigorous administration 
the service of the State freely opened to merit 
trial by jury, law reform, church reform, university 
reform, the union of the three kingdoms, a pacified 
and .civilized Ireland, and with no halting and 
wavering foreign policy, but the glorious headship 
of the Protestant cause in Europe ; above all with 
that to which Milton pointed as the chief work 
of his chief of men, that for which the leader 
of the Independents had throughout fought and 
suffered — liberty of conscience. Cromwell might 
well think that he thus gave the nation all the 
substantial objects for which it had fought. But 
how far in this policy personal ambition may 
have mingled with public wisdom is a question 



88 Three English Statesmen. 

which, as I said before, can be answered by the 
Searcher of Hearts alone. 

After the foundation of the monarchy wonld 
necessarily have come a dynasty, with all the ac- 
cidents and infirmities to which dynasties are lia- 
ble ; but this dynasty would have been bound by 
stronger pledges than the Hanoverian dynasty was 
to Protestantism and Constitutional Government. 

We need not sneer at the high aspirations of 
Vane and the Republicans. If some men did not 
aspire too high, the world in general would fall 
too low. But few think that a democratic repub- 
lic would then have been possible even for En- 
gland ; much less would it have been possible 
for the three kingdoms, as yet most imperfectly 
united, and two of them politically in a very 
backward state. It must have been an oligarch- 
ical republic like that of Holland: and it must 
have been, for a long time at least, a party re- 
public. Vane said that none were worthy to be 
citizens who had not fought for liberty. There 
would thus have been no prospect of reconcilia- 
tion or of oblivion : the fruit of the nation's suffer- 
ings would have been a chronic civil war. It was 
time to make England again a nation. This a na- 
tional government alone could do. And as mat- 
ters stood, the government of a single chief, raised 
in some measure above all parties, could alone be 



Cromwell. 89 

national. Cromwell's first act after Worcester had 
been to press on the parliament a general amnes- 
ty, in which he was supposed as usual to have 
some sinister end in view. The first day of his 
reign was the last of confiscation and of ven- 
geance. From that day every Cavalier was safe 
in person and estate ; might, after a short proba- 
tion, regain the full rights of a citizen ; might, by 
mere submission to the established government 
and without injury to his honor, became eligible 
to the highest offices of the State. 

The conduct of Cromwell has been contrasted 
with that of Washington. The two cases were 
quite different. In the case of Washington there 
had not been a civil war in the proper sense of 
the term, but a national struggle against an exter- 
nal power, which left the nation united under a 
national government at its close. England, as 
Cromwell said in his rough way, stood in need of 
a constable : America did not. 

On the other hand, the insulting violence of the 
manner in which Cromwell turned out the Long 
Parliament is not to be justified. That scene 
leaves a stain on his character as a man and as a 
statesman. By thus setting his heel on the honor 
of those with whom he had acted, and whose 
commission he bore, he was guilty of a breach of 
good policy as well as of right feeling. He need- 



90 Three English Statesmen, 

lessly stamped tlie origin of his own government 
with the character of violent usurpation, and he 
made for himself deadly enemies of all those on 
whom he had trampled. It is not improbable 
that he was hurried away by his emotions, which, 
dissembler as he is supposed to have been, some- 
times got the better, to an extraordinary ex- 
tent, of his outward self-control: aud that, hav- 
ing wound himself up by a great effort to a 
doubtful act, he went beyond his mark, and 
launched out into language and gestures which to 
those who witnessed them seemed insane. In his 
first speech to the Little Parliament, he paid at 
least a tribute of homage to legality and right feel- 
ing. " I speak here in the presence of some that 
were at the closure of our consultations, and as 
before the Lord — the thinking of an act of vio- 
lence was to us worse than any battle that ever 
we were in, or that could be, to the utmost hazard 
of our lives : so willing were we, even very tender 
and desirous, if possible, that these men might quit 
their places with honor." Be it remembered, too, 
that there was no insolent parade of military pow- 
er. Cromwell went down to the house not in uni- 
form, but in plain clothes. Much less were there 
the arrests, the street massacres, and the deporta- 
tions, which constitute the glory of a coup cVetat 
in France. 



Cromwell. 9 1 

To restore the Constitutional and Protestant 
monarchy in his own person was Cromwell's aim. 
In this enterprise he had against him all the par- 
ties ; bnt he might flatter himself that he had 
the secret wishes and the tendencies of the nation 
on his side. He had in his favor the divisions 
among his enemies, which were such that they 
could scarcely ever act in concert; his own sur- 
passing genius ; a temperament which never knew 
despair ; a knowledge of men gained by reading 
the heart when it is most open, at the council- 
board in dangerous extremity, or on the eve of 
battle by the camp-fire side. And the army, 
though opposed in the main to his design of re- 
storing the monarchy, was bound to his person by 
the spell of victory. 

The step from civil war to legal government can. 
not be made at once. There must be a period of 
transition, during which government is half milita- 
ry, half legal, and while law is gradually resuming 
its sway, the efforts of the defeated parties to pre- 
vent a government from being founded will have to 
be repressed by force. It will be the duty of the 
head of the government to see that his measures 
of repression are strong enough and not too 
strong; that he hastens, as much as the enemies 
of the government will permit, the restoration 
of the reign of law. Cromwell well understood 



92 Three English Statesmen. 

the true doctrine of political necessity. "When 
matters of necessity come," he said to his par- 
liament, " then without guilt extraordinary reme- 
dies may be applied ; but if necessity be pretend- 
ed, there is so much the more sin." He did not 
allow the government to be military for an hour; 
but at once summoning the Barbones Parliament, 
rendered up his authority into their hands. " To 
divest the sword of all power in the civil adminis- 
tration" was the declared object of the great sol- 
dier in summoning this assembly. A parliament 
the assembly is called ; but it was not elective 
or representative ; it was a convention of Puritan 
notables called by Cromwell. It was denounced 
at the time and has since been commonly regard- 
ed as a junta of fanatics who wanted to sweep 
away law, learning, and civil society to make 
room for the code of Moses and the reign of the 
saints. It went to work in eleven committees; 
for the reform of the law ; for the reform of pris- 
ons ; for the reform of the finances and the light- 
ening of taxation ; for Ireland ; for Scotland ; for 
the army; for petitions; for public debts; for the 
regulation of the commissions of the, peace and 
the reform of the poor-law ; for the advancement 
of trade ; for the advancement of learning. 
Among its proceedings we find measures for the 
care of lunatics and idiots, for the regular per- 



Cromwell. 03 

formance of marriages and the registration of 
births and deaths, for probate of wills in all coun- 
ties, for law reforms which pointed both to a 
more speedy and cheaper administration of justice 
and to the preparation of a simple and intelligible 
code of law. We have not yet carried into effect 
the whole programme of these mad fanatics ; but 
we have carried into effect a good part of it, and 
we are hoping to carry into effect the rest. But 
the Barbones Parliament was wanting in knowl- 
edge of government : it attempted too much and 
it went too fast, common faults in a revolution, 
when the minds of men are stimulated to the 
morbid activity of political thought. It aroused 
the formidable opposition of all the lawyers and 
of all the ministers of religion : it showed an incli- 
nation prematurely to reduce the army, which, it 
is idle to doubt, was still the indispensable sup- 
port not only of the general's power, but of the 
cause ; and, moreover, it did not do the essential 
thing; it did not take measures for the founda- 
tion of a government, while it had no title to be 
the government itself. Cromwell determined to 
bring its sittings to an end. As usual, it is 
thought that he was playing a deep game, that he 
had foreseen that the Barbones Parliament must 
fail and that its failure would render him more 
indispensable than ever. A deep game indeed, 



94 Three English Statesmen, 

to bring together the leading men among yonr 
own friends, discredit them by failure, and then 
make them yonr enemies by sending them away ! 
If Cromwell intended that the Barbones Parlia- 
ment should prove a failure, he took a strange way 
to his end, for he undoubtedly summoned to it 
the best men he could find — men so good that his 
enemies were greatly chagrined at seeing an as- 
sembly so respectable answer to his call. The 
Machiavellian theory of his conduct was easily 
framed after the event: no sagacity could have 
framed it before. 

Cromwell now called a council of leading men, 
civilians as well as soldiers, to settle the govern- 
ment : and this council made him Lord Protector 
of the three kingdoms, with the provisional con- 
stitution called the Instrument of Government. 
And if Cromwell set up arbitrary power, here is 
the arbitrary power which he set up. The ex- 
ecutive government is to be vested in an elective 
Protector and a Council of State. The members 
of the Council of State for the first turn are 
named in the Instrument. When a vacancy oc- 
curs, Parliament is to elect six candidates; of 
these six the Council of State is to choose two, 
and of these two the Protector is to choose one. 
The powers of legislation and taxation are to be 
vested in Parliament alone, the Protector having 



Cromwell. 95 

only a suspensive veto for twenty days. A Par- 
liament is to be held once at least in every three 
years. The Protector is to have the disposal of 
the army with the consent of the Parliament 
when Parliament is sitting, of the elective Coun- 
cil of State when it is not. In the event of war, 
Parliament is at once to be convoked. The Pro- 
tector and the Council are empowered to frame 
ordinances for the government of the country till 
Parliament meets ; a temporary provision, which 
only gave a legal character to an inevitable exer- 
cise of power. It was probably designed by the 
chief framers of the Instrument that the elective 
Protector should make way for an hereditary 
king ; but no design was ever entertained of de- 
parting from the constitutional principles on 
which this settlement was based: on the con- 
trary, those principles were afterward most dis- 
tinctly ratified in the document called the Peti- 
tion and Advice, under which Cromwell was in- 
vited to take upon him the title of king. The 
Protector declared himself content to submit to 
all these limitations of his power, and ready to 
submit to farther limitations, if by so doing he 
could satisfy the Parliament and give peace to 
the nation. 

The constitution enacted by the Instrument 
presents several points of interest. Government 



96 Three English Statesmen. 

under it can hardly be party government, the 
members of the Council of State being elected 
by personal merit, for life, and under conditions 
which prevent the Council from becoming a 
cabinet or cabal. Provision is made for the per- 
manent existence of a national council, even in 
the Parliamentary recess. The army is brought 
thoroughly under the constitution. The nation 
is secured against the danger of being entangled 
in a war, without its own consent, by the minis- 
ters of the crown. The organic legislation of 
Cromwell's time may still deserve the considera- 
tion of constitutional reformers, if the nation 
should ever desire to emancipate itself from the 
government of party, which by its faction-fights, 
its rogueries, its hypocrisies, the ascendancy which 
it gives to mere Parliamentary gladiators — if the 
name of gladiator is not profaned by applying it 
to the hero of a venomous tongue — and by its 
failures at home and abroad, must be beginning 
to breed serious thoughts in the mind of every 
independent lover of his country. 

The Instrument embodied a measure of Par- 
liamentary Reform, which Clarendon says was 
fit to be more warrantably made and in a better 
time. The representation was fairly re-distributed 
on the basis of population. The small boroughs 
were swept away. Representatives were given 



Cromwell. 97 

to large towns hitherto unrepresented, Manches- 
ter among the number. The county representa- 
tion was greatly increased ; Yorkshire, for exam- 
ple, having fourteen members. Not only real 
but personal property was admitted as a qualifi- 
cation for the county franchise, every person be- 
ing empowered to vote who had property of any 
kind to the value of £200, so that the copy-hold- 
ers, of whom there were a large number at that 
period, would have been enfranchised, as well as 
the leaseholders for lives, who were also a nu- 
merous class. Tenants at will, on the other hand, 
would not have been enfranchised unless they 
had independent property, to the requisite value, 
of their own. The result would have been most 
worthy and independent county constituencies, 
consisting in great measure of the yeomen, whose 
political virtue and military valor had just saved 
and still sustained the country. The borough 
franchise, with all its varieties of suffrage, was 
left untouched. If this measure still does not 
sound democratic, we must bear in mind that 
serfage had but recently ceased to exist in En- 
gland, while its traces still lingered in Scotland ; 
that the manufacturing interest and the artisan 
class were in their infancy ; that this was the last 
stage of the feudal, whereas ours is the industrial 

era. To know the value of Cromwell's Reform, 

E 



98 Three English Statesmen. 

we have only to consider what the rotten bor- 
oughs, to which the Restoration of course revert- 
ed, did for us in the two centuries which follow- 
ed the Protectorate. 

The Protector was now installed with mod- 
erate state, and on the next 3d of September, his 
lucky day, he took the first great step toward the 
restoration of Constitutional Government by meet- 
ing his first Parliament. That Parliament proved 
refractory. Instead of voting the necessary sup- 
plies and doing the business of the country, its 
members fell to questioning the right of the Pro- 
tector. The answer to their questionings was 
simple. If they wanted divine right, it was by 
the Protector's hand that God had saved them 
all. If they wanted human right, it was by vir- 
tue of his writ that they were there. In the end 
it was found necessary to put to each member a 
test, in the form of an engagement to be faithful 
to the established government by a single person 
and a parliament. The test was nothing more 
than was implied in the writ under which each 
member had been elected ; yet many of the Re- 
publicans refused it and were excluded. Even 
after this purging, the Parliament remained in- 
tractable. It silent its time in the persecution of 
a Socinian, and showed a tendency to tamper 
with the fundamental principle on which Crom- 



Cromwell. 99 

well always insisted — liberty of conscience. The 
Protector at last dissolved it, with thunder in his 
voice and on his brow ; and in doing so he did 
well. 

He was now driven again to govern for a time 
without Parliament ; and the Koyalist plots and 
risings obliged him to appoint major-generals. 
But his government was taking root. The na- 
tion felt the beneficence of his administration; 
the glories of its foreign policy touched its heart. 
Men contrasted them with the ignominy of the 
Stuarts, as when the Stuarts were restored they 
had reason to do again. The tidings of Blake's 
victories were ringing through England when 
the Protector again met a Parliament. 

This time nothing was to be risked. The 
known malcontents were from the first excluded. 
Their exclusion, though veiled under a legal 
form, was an act of arbitrary power. The justifi- 
cation for it was, that if these members had been 
allowed to take their seats, they would have 
done their best to overturn the government; that, 
if they had overturned the government, they 
would have brought in not the Eepublic of 
which Vane dreamed, nor the reign of the Saints 
of which Harrison dreamed, nor the Covenanted 
King and the Calvinistic Church of which the 
Presbyterians dreamed, but the Stuarts ; and that 



ioo Three English Statesmen. 

if they had brought in the Stuarts, they would 
have canceled the revolution, wrecked the cause, 
and set their own heads on Temple Bar. 

After the exclusion, the Parliament still num- 
bered three hundred and sixty members, friendly 
in the main. And now the time was come for 
the great attempt. A long train of wagons 
bore through London streets the spoils and tro- 
phies of Blake's victories over Spain. A poet 
was writing — 

"Let the brave generals divide that bough, 
Our great Protector hath such wreaths enow : 
His conquering head has no more room for bays, 
Then let it be as the glad nation prays ; 
Let the rich ore forthwith be melted down, 
And the State fixed by making him a crown : 
With ermine clad and purple let him hold 
A royal sceptre made of Spanish gold. " 

By the series of resolutions called the Petition 
and Advice the Protector was invited to take 
upon him the government by a higher title, and 
with a second house, which was to consist of 
seventy members to be named by the chief mag- 
istrate with the consent of Parliament. Then fol- 
lowed the most anxious deliberation in Crom- 
well's life. He spoke himself of royalty with in- 
difference, as a feather in the cap, the shining 
bauble for crowds to kneel and gaze at. I am 
ready, for my part, to believe that a man who has 
done such things in such a cause may, by the 



Cromwell. 101 

grace of heaven, keep his heart above tinsel. But 
we know why the title of king might, apart from 
any love of tinsel, seem essential to his policy. 
The lawyers could not get on without it; the 
people, as they then were, craved for it. It was 
constitutional, whereas that of Protector was not 
constitutional: it saved persons adhering to the 
king de facto under the statute of Henry VII., 
whereas that of Protector did not. But the stern 
Kepublicans of the army were resolute against 
monarchy. It was not for a king that they had 
shed their blood. To their opposition Cromwell 
for the present yielded. Probably he not only 
yielded to it, but respected it. To be turned 
from his course by fear, it has been truly said, 
was not a failing to which he was prone. But 
ardent, sanguine, inexhaustible in resources as he 
was, he was the victim of no illusions. He knew 
the difference between the difficult and the im- 
possible ; he faced difficulty without fear, and he 
recognized impossibility without repining, and 
again turned his mind steadily toward the future. 

So Cromwell mingled not with the crowd of 
kings. He wore no crown but "Worcester's 
laureat wreath," and the more laureat wreath of 
Milton's verse. Fate ordained that he should 
stand in history a chief of the people. 

Part of the Petition and Advice however was 



102 Three English Statesmen, 

carried into effect. The Protectorate had been 
elective. The Protector was now empowered to 
name his successor. There had hitherto been 
only one House of Parliament : there were now 
to be two, and the still half-feudal instincts of 
the nation were to be indulged with a House of 
Lords. This was the first Parliamentary settle- 
ment of the new constitution; the Instrument 
of Government under which the Protector had 
hitherto acted having been framed as a provision- 
al arrangement by a council of military and po- 
litical chiefs. To mark the legal commencement 
of his power the Protector was installed with 
more solemnity than before, and with ceremonies 
more resembling a coronation, the account of 
which is given us by Whitelocke, who, though 
no lover of Cromwell, seems to have been im- 
pressed with the scene. In Westminster Hall, 
under a canopy of state, was placed a chair of 
state upon an ascent of two degrees, with seats 
down the hall for the parliament, the dignitaries 
of the law, the mayor and aldermen of London. 
Thither on the 26th of June, 1657* went the Pro- 
tector with his council of state, his ministers, his 
gentlemen, sergeants-at-arms, officers, and heralds. 
His Highness standing under the canopy of state, 
the Speaker, in the name of the Parliament, put 
on him a robe of purple velvet lined with ermine, 



Cromwell. 103 

delivered to him the Bible, richly gilt and 
bossed, girt on him the sword of State, and put a 
golden sceptre into his hand. The same func- 
tionary then gave him the oath to observe the 
constitution, with solemn good wishes for the 
prosperity of his government. Mr. Manton, the 
chaplain, next by prayer recommended the Pro- 
tector, the parliament, the council, the forces by 
land and sea, the whole government and people 
of the three nations to the blessing and protec- 
tion of God. Then the people gave a shout and 
the trumpets sounded. The Protector took his 
seat in the chair of State, with the ambassadors 
of the friendly nations and the high officers of 
the Protectorate round him ; and as he did so 
the trumpets sounded again, heralds proclaimed 
the title of his Highness, and the people shouted 
once more " God save the Lord Protector." So 
looked sovereignty when for a moment it emerged 
from feudalism and showed itself in the aspect of 
the modern time. At the gorgeous coronation 
of Napoleon, some one asked the Republican 
General Augereau whether any thing was want- 
ing to the splendor of the scene ? " Nothing," 
replied Augereau, " but the presence of the million 
of men who have died to do away with all this." 
There was not much in Cromwell's installation 
to do away with which any man of sense had 



104 Three English Statesmen. 

died. We got "back afterward to the more au- 
gust and venerable ceremony, with the bishops, 
the anointings, the champion in armor, and the 
glorious expense, which the finances of the Pro- 
tectorate could ill bear. At the coronation of 
George III., as Horace Walpole tells us, Lord 
Talbot, the Lord Steward, had taught his horse 
to back all down the hall after his rider had de- 
livered the cup to the king; but the too well- 
trained animal insisted on backing into the hall 
and going all up it with its tail in the king's 
face. 

The second Parliament wasted time and vio- 
lated the Protector's principles by the persecu- 
tion of Naylor, a poor victim of the religious 
frenzy which had seized many weak natures in 
the vortex of a religious revolution. But it voted 
supplies, and on the Avhole acted cordially with 
the Protector. Hope dawned on the grand en- 
terprise. 

Its dawn was ag;ain overcast. When Parlia- 
ment met after the recess, it was with the ex- 
cluded members restored to their seats, and with 
an Upper House. The Upper House was a fail- 
ure. An old aristocracy may be patched to any 
extent, especially if some freedom is allowed in 
constructing Norman pedigrees; but to make a 
new one when the age of conquest and conquer- 



Cromwell. 105 

ing races is past, is happily not an easy thing. 
Cromwell got few men of territorial or social con- 
sequence to sit, and he incurred many damaging 
refusals. He said that he wanted something to 
stand between him and the Lower House his 
direct contests with which were no doubt bring- 
ing a heavy strain upon his government. But to 
make up his House of Lords, he had to take 
many of his supporters from the Lower House, 
where the great battle of supplies was to be 
fought, and probably to break up the lead for 
the government there. The result was that the 
Lower House fell foul of the Upper, and the ship 
became unmanageable once more. At the same 
time, and perhaps in consequence of the distress 
of the Government, conspiracies, both Koyalist 
and Eepublican, had broken out on the most for- 
midable scale. It was necessary at once to dis- 
miss Parliament, and to deal with this danger. 
And so effectually was it dealt with, though at a 
small cost of blood, that, after this, the Koyalists 
rose no more. The hopes of that party, in the 
eyes of the shrewdest judges in Europe, were 
dead : and Charles Stuart could scarcely obtain 
common courtesy, much less recognition or sup- 
port, from Mazarin or Don Louis de Haro. Only 
the Presbyterians had the power which, when 

Cromwell was gone, they used with such happy 

E 2 



106 Three English Statesmen. 

results to the nation and themselves, of setting 
the Stuarts again upon the throne. 

In these contests with refractory parliaments, 
the great soldier and statesman had to play the 
part of an orator. He was too old to learn a new 
art. He did not prepare his speeches ; and when 
he was ashed to write down one of them a few 
days after it had been delivered, he declared that 
he could not remember a word of it. Clumsier 
or more uncouth compositions than the reports 
which have come down to us, the records of bad 
oratory do not contain. The grammar is hope- 
less, the metaphors and confusions of metaphor 
most grotesque — " God kindling a seed" — " the 
Lord pouring the nation from vessel to vessel, till 
He poured it into your lap." The last editor 
only makes the matter worse by his running 
commentary of admiring ejaculations. But the 
speeches are not kings' speeches. There runs 
through them all a strong though turbid tide of 
thought. They are the utterances of one who 
sees his object clearly, presses toward it earnest- 
ly, and struggles to bear forward in the same 
course the reluctant wills and wavering intellects 
of other men. The great features of his situation, 
the great principles on which he was acting, are 
brought out, as M. Guizot says, with a breadth 
and force which are a strong proof of a states- 



Cromwell. 107 

man-like intellect, and not a small proof perhaps 
of good faith. But he pleaded to deaf ears. It 
is vain to rail at those who refused to listen to 
him, and who thwarted him to the end. They 
were not great men. They were contending, 
many of them at least, in singleness of heart, for 
what they believed to be the good cause. They 
might say with truth that Cromwell had changed ; 
that the language of the Revolutionary Soldier 
was not that of the Head of the State ; that his 
mind had grown more comprehensive, his vision 
clearer since he had risen to a higher point of 
view and into serener air : and, as he had 
changed, they might represent him to themselves 
as a renegade and a traitor. These misunder- 
standings between men who yesterday stood side 
by side are another mournful part of revolutions. 
We owe those who resisted Cromwell forbear- 
ance and respect. So far as they were struggling 
for English law against what they believed to be 
lawless power, we owe them gratitude. Princi- 
ples are worth incomparably more than any pos- 
sible benefits of any one man's rule. Yet the 
conduct of these patriots brought ruin on all 
they loved. 

When Parliament refused the necessary sup- 
plies, the Protector was compelled to levy the 
old taxes by an ordinance in Council : but he 



108 Three English Statesmen, 

did this with manifest reluctance, and with a 
manifest desire to return to Parliamentary taxa- 
tion, as well as to Parliamentary government in 
other respects. The spoils of the Spanish gal- 
leons helped his finances for a time. A less no- 
ble source of supply was an income-tax of ten per 
cent, levied on the Koyalists after their great re- 
volt. In that great resource, frugality, the gov- 
ernment of Cromwell was rich ; considering what 
it did, it was the cheapest government England 
ever had. But the truth is, greatness is generally 
cheap : it is littleness aping greatness that is so 
dear. The Protector offered to lay the financial 
administration open to the most rigorous inspec- 
tion. He was not afraid, he said, on that score 
to face the nation. He was ready, in fact, to do 
any thing, except to allow the government to be 
overturned : rather than that, he said, he would 
be rolled with infamy into his grave. 

All this time he had been struggling with a 
series of plots against his power and his life. 
The ground on which his tottering throne was 
reared heaved on all sides with conspiracy and 
rebellion. The plotters were not only Royalists 
but fanatical Republicans, leaguing themselves 
in their frenzy with Royalists to their own de- 
struction. To the Republicans Cromwell be- 
haved as to old friends estranged. The utmost 



Cromwell. 109 

that he did was to put them for a time in safe 
keeping, when they would have laid desperate 
hands on the life of their own cause. He was 
careful too of their honor; and so long as they 
would be quiet, never put to them any oath or 
test. With the Royalists he dealt rigorously, as 
old enemies, yet mercifully, as all fearless natures 
do. When they had risen in arms against him, 
he placed them under the control of the Major- 
Generals, and laid on them, not a fine of the tenth 
part of their property, but an income-tax of ten 
per cent. It is said that this taxing of the Roy- 
alists was a breach of the Act of Oblivion. It was 
so ; but what was their insurrection ? 

In the punishment of political offenses, Crom- 
well did his best to return from the revolutionary 
high courts of justice to trial by jury. The first 
case with which he had to deal was that of Lil- 
burn, an aimless and egotistical agitator, though 
otherwise pure and brave, who had returned from 
exile merely to prevent the settlement of the na- 
tion. Lilburn was sent before a jury ; but the 
jury being strong partisans, and the court being 
crowded with the friends of the accused, the gov- 
ernment failed to obtain a conviction, and was 
driven to the worst course of all — that of mixing 
force with law, by keeping Lilburn in custody 
after his acquittal. The conspirators in Vowell 



no Three English Statesmen. 

and Gerrard's plot, and those in Slingsby's plot, 
were sent before a high court of justice. But 
Cromwell's high court of justice was not like the 
French revolutionary tribunal, or an Irish or Ja- 
maica court-martial. It consisted of a large num- 
ber of judges, inpluding the highest functionaries 
of the law, it sat publicly, proceeded deliberately, 
and observed the legal rules of evidence : nor, 
unless to murder the Protector and overturn the 
government was no offense, does the slightest sus- 
picion rest upon it of having shed one drop of in- 
nocent blood. The Royalists taken in Penrud- 
dock's rebellion were tried before juries in the 
counties where the rebellion occurred : so little 
known to this military despot were our present 
theories of martial law. The daggers of the Roy- 
alists were always threatening the Protector's life. 
And not their daggers only : a proclamation was 
circulated in the name of the exiled king, prom- 
ising great rewards and honors to whoever would 
take the usurper off with pistol, sword, or poi- 
son. It is commonly believed that his nerves 
were completely shaken by the fear of assassina- 
tion; but the well-known passage of Hume, de- 
scribing the Protector's agonies of alarm, is a rhe- 
torical improvement on the passage in the rabidly 
Royalist work of Dr. Bates, the court physician 
to Charles II., and I believe the statement has no 



Cromwell. in 

trustworthy foundation. Cromwell, of course, 
took the necessary precautions, and as the author 
of " Killing no Murder" assured him, great pre- 
cautions were necessary; but there is nothing in 
his bearing or in his policy to the end of his life 
to show that fear had shaken his fortitude ; and 
assuredly it did not shake his clemency. Of the 
forty men arrested for Vowell and Gerrard's plot, 
three only were sent before the high court of jus- 
tice, and of those three one was spared. In Slings- 
by's plot five persons only suffered, though it was 
a formidable conspiracy to deliver Hull to the 
Spaniards, and at the same time to raise an insur- 
rection in London, which would have filled the 
city with fire and blood. Few besides the actual 
leaders suffered death for Penruddock's rebellion, 
though a good many of their followers were trans- 
ported. Fear for his government, though his life 
was in no danger, impelled Bonaparte to murder 
a Bourbon prince who had approached his frontier. 
Ormond, Cromwell's most formidable, as well as 
his* most honorable enemy, came to London in dis- 
guise to get up a plot against the government. 
His presence was detected. Cromwell took Lord 
Broghil, Ormond's former associate, aside, and said 
to him, " If you wish to do a kindness to an old 
friend, Ormond is in London; warn him to be- 
gone." Those were harder times than ours, and 



112 Three English Statesmen. 



<b 



civil war begets recklessness of human life: but the 
strongest man of those times in his true strength 
has bequeathed a lesson to the emasculate senti- 
mentalism which counterfeits manliness by affect- 
ing sympathy with deeds of violence and blood. 

There can be no doubt that the Stuart princes 
and their advisers were privy to assassination 
plots. Cromwell had threatened that if they 
used assassins, he would make it a war of assas- 
sination. But he was not a Stuart prince, and 
he never degraded his nobler nature by putting 
his threat in execution. 

Algernon Sidney, stanch republican as he 
was, told Burnet that the Protector had just no- 
tions of public liberty. In one respect at least 
he had juster notions of liberty than his parlia- 
ments, for he stood out against them for freedom 
of conscience, and his veto on acts of persecution 
was one of the powers which he would never let 
go. " To save free conscience" was the special 
task to which he had been called by one who un- 
derstood the interests of freedom of conscience 
well, and he seems to have performed that work 
faithfully according to his lights, which it is es- 
pecially necessary, with reference to this subject, 
to bear in mind were not those of an inspired 
hero, but those of an uninspired Puritan of the 
seventeenth century, sitting at the feet of Hugh 



Cromwell. 113 

Peters and in thralldom to Hugh Peters's su- 
perstitions, believing in the necessity of Dog- 
ma, and believing, we may . be quite sure, in 
witchcraft. Theoretically, of course, his tolera- 
tion embraced only Protestants and Trinitari- 
ans, all sects of whom he desired to see not only 
at peace with each other, but united, in spite of 
those secondary differences which he deemed of 
no importance compared with the vital principles 
of the Christian faith. But the greatness of his 
nature carried him beyond his theory, and in all 
cases we find him practically the enemy of perse- 
cution. He snatched Biddle, the Socinian, from 
the fangs of Parliament, placed him in mild con- 
finement, and, so soon as it was safe, set him free. 
He tried to procure the formal re-admission of 
the Jews to England, from which they had been 
banished since the time of Edward I., and, fail- 
ing in this, he protected individual Jews who set- 
tled in this country. He left the Koman Cath- 
olics practically unmolested in conscience and in 
their private worship, while they were burning 
Protestants alive wherever they had the power, 
though he could not have permitted the open cel- 
ebration of the mass without causing an out- 
break among the people. The persecution of 
Catholic priests, which had been going on during 
the latter days of the Parliament, soon abated 



H4 Three English Statesmen. 

when he became Protector. At one time he 
launched some fierce ordinances both against the 
Catholics and the Anglicans, not on account of 
their religious opinions but on account of their 
political j)lots and insurrections. Generally the 
Anglicans enjoyed' under him as much liberty as 
they could expect, when the foot of Laud had 
but just been taken from the neck of the nation. 
All sects, in fact, even the most unpopular, even 
those which the Protector himself most hated 
and had the bitterest reason to hate as the nurs- 
eries not only of his political opponents but of 
the assassins who sought his life, provided they 
would only abstain from active attempts to over- 
throw the government, were sure of obtaining 
under that government the utmost measure of 
freedom which could be expected from the most 
liberal spirit of that age. The Presbyterians, 
who had persecuted Cromwell with the most un- 
relenting malignity, were never persecuted by 
him. On the contrary, his scheme of church 
polity comprehended them, and he was most de- 
sirous that they should come in. It was in this 
matter of freedom of conscience that the man 
was most before his age, and that the most mo- 
mentous issues hung upon his life: issues how 
momentous we see from the religious perplexity 
and distress into which, partly by the reversal 



Cromwell. 1 1 5 

of his policy, we have been brought. Reasons 
have been already given for believing that this 
was in him, not the toleration of indifference, bnt 
the real toleration of a man of strong conviction. 
Much as his mind had grown in stature, he re- 
mained to the last open to the impressions even 
of very fanatical preachers of the doctrines which 
had been the spring of his own spiritual life. 
He liked to commune with such enthusiasts as 
Foxe. This may have been, and no doubt was, 
partly policy : it was to persecuted sectaries that 
the government of the Independent chief es- 
pecially appealed. But great simplicity of relig- 
ious feeling is compatible with high intellect : 
and, after all, the enthusiasts, who, whenever the 
spirit of the world is deeply moved, come forth 
preaching a more equal state of society, and a 
brotherhood of man, are they the people whom 
the profoundest political philosophy would most 
despise? Are they mere dreamers, or do they 
dream of that which is to come ? 

When we consider that the Protector's reign 
lasted but five years and that it was a constant 
struggle for the existence of his government 
and his own life, and when we think what he 
achieved, we must allow that his administration 
was as high a proof of practical capacity as was 
ever given by man. Or rather, it was as high a 



1 1 6 Three English Statesmen, 

proof as ever was given of the power of a nation 
when, in a moment of extraordinary exaltation, 
the nation finds a worthy organ in its chief. 

In the department of justice, the Protector put 
upon the bench the best judges probably that 
England had ever had, and at their head Sir 
Matthew Hale. He made strenuous efforts to re- 
form those monstrous delays and abuses of the 
Court of Chancery, which afterward insulted rea- 
son and sullied public justice for nearly two 
hundred years. He wished to reform the crim- 
inal law, which the Tudor despots and their aris- 
tocratic parliaments had made a code of blood. 
" It was a scandalous thing," he said, " that a 
man should be hanged for a theft of twelvepence 
or sixpence when greater crimes went unpunish- 
ed." A man of the people, he did not share the 
aristocratic recklessness of plebeian blood, which 
had lavished, and which when he was gone lav- 
ished still more, capital punishment for vulgar 
offenses, while the worse offenses of the privi- 
leged class went free. Had he succeeded, the 
work of Romilly would have been performed, in 
part at least, two centuries before. 

Every thing was done to foster commerce, and 
that interest seems at this time to have received 
a permanent impulse, which bore it prosperously 
onward even through the maladministration 



Cromwell. 



117 



and the naval disasters of the Kestoration. A 
Committee of Trade was formed, and White- 
locke, who was one of its members, says that this 
was an object on which the Protector's heart was 
greatly set. Other than territorial interests were 
now held to deserve care. If on the subject of 
navigation laws Cromwell was a Protectionist, so 
on the same subject was Adam Smith. Slowly 
the light dawns even on the highest peaks of 
thought. 

A navy had been created by the Parliament 
in the war with the Dutch ; when Vane, at the 
head of the Admiralty, had shown that energy, 
purity, and public spirit, added to intellect, will 
make a great administrator, even of a man who 
has not passed his life in office. But the Pro- 
tector fostered that navy so well that if Blake is 
the father of our naval tactics, Cromwell is the 
father of our naval greatness. 

The army, which found no equal in the 
field, and on whose invincible prowess Clarendon 
could not help dilating when it was disbanded 
by Charles II., was in discipline equally without 
a peer. Though the Protector's power rested on 
the soldiery, their license, if ever it broke out, 
was rigorously repressed. In this so-called mili- 
tary government, no soldier was above the law. 
The swaggering truculence of the praetorian to- 



1 1 8 Three English Statesmen, 

ward fellow-citizens has no connection with the 
military qualities which are the pledges of victo- 
ry over the enemy in the field. 

Among the Chancellors of the University of 
Oxford, the name of Oliver stands a startling re- 
ality in a line of stately buckram. Cromwell 
was not, like Pym and Hampden, highly culti- 
vated ; but he had been bred at a classical school 
and at Cambridge ; and, what was of more conse- 
quence, he had been trained intellectually by 
converse with the highest intellects on the high- 
est subjects of the time. No brutal soldier, no 
drill-sergeant, was he ; nor does his policy as a 
democratic chief afford any reason for believing 
that democracy will be the enemy of culture. 
Though unlearned himself, he fostered learning ; 
he saved and protected the Universities of Ox- 
ford and Cambridge. He founded the Universi- 
ty of Durham. Learned men and men of intel- 
lect of the opinions most opposed to his own, 
studied and wrote in security beneath his rule. 
Turn where you will, you find him, when he is 
left to himself, sympathizing with what is noble, 
and a magnanimous friend to freedom. Alone 
of English princes, he set himself to draw merit 
and promise from the Universities into the serv- 
ice of the State. The men whom he placed at 
the head of Oxford were Puritans of course, but 



Cromwell. 1 1 9 

tliey were learned men and ruled well ; and the 
University improved in nothing, except in politi- 
cal and religious principles, when they were gone. 

Cromwell's church reform, as well as his uni- 
versity reform, was Puritan, but it was compre- 
hensive. It was directed more to piety than 
doctrine, and it imposed no tests. It left an 
Established Church; but it enlarged the liber- 
ties of that Church to the utmost extent possible 
to the reformer, or even conceivable by his mind ; 
and aimed at making the Establishment national 
by taking in the whole nation, not by crushing 
the nation into a sect. It gave the people good 
ministers. Not only was it the most liberal set- 
tlement of its time, but nothing so liberal follow- 
ed for ages afterward. Baxter, who was no friend 
of Cromwell's, allows that the Protector's com- 
missioners " put in able and serious preachers, 
who lived a godly life, of what tolerable opinion 
soever they were, so that many thousands of souls 
blessed God." And thus the people gained that 
for which Cromwell himself had taken arms, and 
which in his eyes was the great object of the 
civil war. 

The conquest of Scotland was followed by an 
incorporating union. Thus was achieved what, 
down to that time, had been the greatest object 
of English policy. Representatives of Scotland 



120 Three English Statesmen. 

were called to the Protector's Parliaments. The 
country was necessarily occupied for some time 
by an army : but that army did not insult or op- 
press the people. As Independents, no doubt 
they paid scanty respect to the divine right of 
the Kirk. They sometimes took the word of God 
out of His minister's mouth, and sat in derision 
on the stool of repentance. In a few cases, it is 
to be feared, they guided Scottish maidens in 
paths which did not lead to heaven. But their 
conduct generally seems to have been better than 
that of any other soldiers in a conquered coun- 
try. So far is religious fanaticism from being 
the root of all vice in man. The heritable juris- 
dictions, with their oppressive absurdities, were 
swept away, and Scotch law courts, the greatest 
nests of corruption in the legal world, saw for a 
time the unwonted face of justice. " Deil think 
them, a ween kinless loons," was the pensive re- 
flection of an old Scotch jobber. These were 
fine days everywhere for kinless loons. " We 
count those years," says Burnet, " years of great 
prosperity." The patriot statesmen of the Resto- 
ration dissolved the Union, and undid the Pro- 
tector's work, that they might exercise in Scot- 
land a provincial despotism, unchecked even by 
a Parliament of Cavaliers. 

The Irish talk of the curse of Cromwell. 



Cromwell. 



121 



They ought rather to talk of the curse of the 
Cromwellians. The real oppressors were the 
military adventurers and the State creditors, to 
whom the Long Parliament had assigned as pay- 
ment the confiscated lands of the Irish land- 
owners implicated in the rebellion. That Crom- 
well intended to exterminate the Irish is an ex- 
ploded fable : from the moment when the rebel- 
lion was suppressed, he bade the mass of the 
Irish people dwell in security and peace. His 
rule unhappily was that of a Puritan over Pa- 
pists, of an Anglo-Saxon conqueror over conquer- 
ed Celts, and this in an age when the highest 
minds were almost inevitably victims to preju- 
dices of religion and race of which the lowest 
minds ought now to be ashamed; but still it was 
the best government that Ireland had ever had. 
By uniting Ireland to England and calling her 
representatives to his parliaments he brought her 
under imperial rule, the surest protection against 
local tyranny that he could give. Has policy in 
this respect was ratified after another century 
and half of disunion and ascendancy by Pitt, or 
rather by those calamities which great men avert, 
but which to ordinary men are the only teachers 
of wisdom. The chiefs of the Irish government 
and law were appointed not by a Dublin faction, 
but by him. He sent over an excellent viceroy 



122 Three English Statesmen. 

in the person of his son Henry, to whom he gave 
counsels of gentleness and moderation; and with 
complaints of the wrongs done to the Irish people 
we find mingled the mention of the Protector's 
name as that of a power (though, no doubt, he 
was too distant a power) of justice. He even saw 
with a statesman's eye what Ireland from its very 
backwardness and unsettlement might be made to 
do for England. In a conversation with Ludlow, 
after dwelling on the delays and expensiveness 
of English law, he added that Cooke, the Chief- 
Justice whom he had sent to Ireland, determined 
more causes in a week than Westminster Hall in 
a year. " Ireland," he went on to say, " is a clean 
paper, and cajDable of being governed by such 
laws as shall be found most agreeable to justice, 
and these may be so administered there as to af- 
ford a good precedent to England itself, where, 
when we shall once perceive that property may 
be preserved at so easy and cheap a rate, we 
shall never, allow ourselves to be cheated and 
abused as we have been." It is not in the matter 
of conveyancing only that Ireland is a clean pa- 
per, where such laws may be tried as shall be 
most agreeable to justice and good precedents es- 
tablished for England herself. 

Of Cromwell's colonial policy the records must 
be sought in colonial archives. The American 



Cromwell. 123 

historian, Mr. Bancroft, says: "Cromwell de- 
clared himself truly ready to serve the brethren 
and the churches in New England. The declara- 
tion was sincere. The people of New England 
were ever sure that Cromwell would listen to 
their requests and would take an interest in all 
the details of their condition. He left them in- 
dependence and favored their trade. When his 
arms had made the conquest of Jamaica he offer- 
ed them the island, with the promise of all the 
wealth which the tropical climate pours into the 
lap of industry, and though they frequently 
thwarted his views they never forfeited his re- 
gard." " English history," proceeds Mr. Ban- 
croft, u must judge of Cromwell by his influence 
on the institutions of England. The American 
colonies remember the years of his power as the 
period when British sovereignty was, for them, 
free from rapacity, intolerance, and oppression. 
He may be called the benefactor of the English 
in America, for he left them to enjoy unshackled 
the benevolence of Providence, the freedom of 
industry, of commerce, of religion, and of govern- 
ment." Cromwell and Chatham, these are the 
two English statesmen the memory of whose 
sympathy America still cherishes; and were 
Cromwell and Chatham "great un-Englishmen" 
and traitors to their country ? 



124 Three English Statesmen. 

But it is to the foreign policy of Cromwell 
that his country, even when she honored his name 
least, has always looked back with a wistful eye. 
Unhappily it is a policy apt not only to be ad- 
mired but to be travestied by wretched imitators 
when the age for it is past. Such imitations are 
the mockery and the bane of greatness. These 
are not the days of commercial monopoly ; Spain 
is not now excluding the trade of all nations 
from the western waters, and forcing them to 
open the high-road of mercantile enterprise by 
arms; nor is Europe now divided between Ca- 
tholicism and Protestantism, waging against each 
other internecine war. The intense spirit of nar- 
row nationality produced by the disruption of 
Christendom has now begun to give place again, 
if not to a new Christendom, at least to some- 
thing like a community of nations. Cromwell's 
was a war policy ; and so far as it was a war 
policy, it was a bad policy, if Christianity be 
true. But it was not a policy of mere aggran- 
dizement. It was the companionship of a cause, a 
cause now out of date, but the best, the purest, 
and the loftiest which the chief of Puritanism 
knew. Why did Cromwell league with France 
against Spain when the power of Spain was de- 
clining, when that of France was on the point of 
rising to a height which threatened the liberty 



Cromwell. 125 

of all nations? The answer is — first, that the 
decline of Spain was scarcely yet visible, even to 
the keenest eye; the vast dependencies, which 
we know now to have been one cause of her de- 
cay, were still thought to be the pillars of her 
towering greatness : secondly, that if Cromwell's 
dynasty had endured, the France of Louis XIV. 
would not have become the tyrant of Europe, for 
that which made her so was the prostration of 
England under the feet of the French king, and 
this was the w^ork of the Restoration : but, third- 
ly, that Spain was the power of persecuting Ca- 
tholicism, and that France, under Mazarin, 
though Catholic, was tolerant compared with 
Spain. To form a great Protestant league, and 
put England at its head again, was a policy 
which, unlike that of modern diplomatists, all the 
nation could understand, which carried the heart 
of the nation with it, and had the moral forces, 
as well as arms, upon its side. The Protector 
stepped into the place of Gustavus Adolphus, as 
the head of Protestant Christendom. The first 
embassy which he sent was to the daughter of 
Gustavus; and Christina, before the madness 
which mingled with the heroic blood of Vasa 
had made her its prey, knew and acknowledged 
her father's heir. Her master of the ceremonies 
was not so kind ; but Whitelocke made his entry 



126 Three English Statesmen, 

into the Swedish capital in a snow-storm, and it 
was a hard trial for a master of the ceremonies to 
stand bare-headed in a snow-storm bowing to the 
ambassador of a regicide republic. A policy of 
mere aggrandizement, without the champion- 
ship of a cause, is not a Cromwellian policy, nor 
are its authors the heirs of Cromwell. Their 
meanness stands contrasted with the majesty of 
the Protector. We have seen that, according to 
Mr. Bancroft, Cromwell offered Jamaica to the 
colonists of New England; and if he annexed 
Dunkirk, it was in those ports that, within the 
memory of living men, Parma had mustered his 
army of invasion to be convoyed by the Arma- 
da. Cromwell would have made England the 
head at once of Protestantism and of Christen- 
dom. As chief of Christendom, he chastised the 
pirates of Tunis and Algiers, then the terror of 
Christian mariners on all seas. At home he was 
struggling for his government and his life with a 
swarm of enemies ; abroad, under his outstretch- 
ed arm, the Protestants of France and Savoy 
worshiped God in peace. I am not an adhe- 
rent of non-intervention, if it means that En- 
gland is to have no sympathies, that she is never 
to interpose for the defense of right or for the 
redress of wrong. I believe that when she is 
again a united nation, though she will not med- 



Cromwell. 127 

die or bluster, she will make herself felt in the 
world once more. Till she is united, no doubt 
she must remain a nullity in Europe : no foreign 
minister can act with effect, except as the organ 
of the nation and with the nation at his back. 
The case of the Protestants of Savoy stirred the 
Protector's soul from its very depths : his feel- 
ings were expressed by the pen of Milton ; and 
surely never did such a secretary serve, such a 
prince in such a cause. Cromwell did not send 
vaporing dispatches; he interposed effectually, 
and right was done. He talked of making the 
name of an Englishman as respected as that of a 
Roman in a strain suited to those days, not suit- 
ed to ours. But he did not seek to win respect 
for the English name by ignoble swagger, or by 
trampling on the weak. He spared the dignity 
even of the Duke of Savoy, though if the Duke 
had refused justice, he would have struck him to 
the dust. 

The part of a conqueror, which Europe expect- 
ed that Cromwell would assume in his own per- 
son, his good sense at once renounced : and on 
the evening of Worcester he sheathed his sword 
forever. Mr. Hall am, who was infected with the 
Whig worship of Napoleon, speaks of his idol as 
the child of philosophy and of enlightenment, and 
contrasts him with Cromwell, who, he says, " had 



128 Three English Statesmen. 

sucked the dregs of a besotted fanaticism." I 
find it difficult to conceive any fanaticism either 
so besotted or so cruel as that which leads a man 
to sacrifice the lives of millions and the happiness 
of hundreds of millions to his own " star." 

" Cromwell," says Burnet, " studied to seek out 
able and honest men and to employ them, and so 
having heard that my father had a very good rep- 
utation in Scotland for piety and integrity, though 
he knew him to be a Royalist, he sent to him de- 
siring him to accept a judge's place, and do justice 
in his own country, hoping only that he would 
not act against his government ; but he would 
not press him to subscribe or swear to it." This 
man had indeed a royal eye for merit and a royal 
heart to advance it in the state. Nor was he too 
nice in scrutinizing the opinions of able men, nor, 
so long as they served England well, did he too 
curiously inquire how they would serve him. 
Here again he stands contrasted with Bonaparte, 
whose first thought in advancing men was their 
subserviency to himself, who even avoided pro- 
moting officers of the artillery, because that 
service had the character of being republican. 
There is no pledge of greatness so rare, so deci- 
sive, or so noble as the choice of associates who 
will not be tools. Blake was a Republican. 
Lockhart, the chief instrument of the Protector's 



Cromwell. 129 

foreign policy and the first diplomatist of the 
day, was an old Royalist,. whose value Cromwell 
had discerned. He was employed again as am- 
bassador at Paris under Charles II., and still 
showed something of the spirit of the Protector- 
ate in altered times. The King of France once 
produced a private letter from Charles, obtained 
by corrupt influence and contrary to Lockhart's 
public -instructions. " Sire," said Lockhart, " the 
King of England speaks to your majesty only 
through me." Sir Matthew Hale had been coun- 
sel to Strafford and the king : and he well justi- 
fied the Protector's choice by boldly braving the 
wrath of the Protector himself, who, tried beyond 
endurance by the resistance to the establishment 
of his government, had been betrayed into one of 
those brief outbreaks of arbitrary violence which, 
though culpable in themselves, illustrated the 
more signally his general desire to govern under 
the law. Royal natures, even on a throne, love 
simplicity of life. The Protector kept such state 
as became the head of a great nation, but it was 
a modest state, unlike the tawdry pageantry of 
the court of Bonaparte. A man of little refine- 
ment and accustomed to the comradeship of the 
camp, Cromwell in private was apt to relieve his 
burdened mind with rude humor, boisterous mer- 
riment, and even coarse practical jokes. But 

F 2 



130 Three English Statesmen. 

when lie received foreign ambassadors, lie knew 
how to show himself the head of a great nation 
and the peer of kings. A leading part of his en- 
tertainments was music, of which he was very 
fond. The court was the first household in En- 
gland, and, as enemies confessed, a good pattern 
to the others, let Mrs. Hutchinson, in her jealousy 
of the Cromwell women, say what she will. 
Whitehall was the scene of work. But some- 
times the Protector shuffled off that terrible coil 
of business and anxiety, and his life-guards waited 
to escort him (their escort was no needless pa- 
geantry) in his ride to Hampton Court. There 
he refreshed his soul with quiet and country air. 
Thither an organ had been brought from the 
chapel of Magdalen College at Oxford, to chase 
away for an hour the throng of cares. But the 
Protector's chief comfort and delight was in his 
family, to which through all the chances and 
changes of his life, in trial alike and in victory, 
his heart had turned. They were all gathered 
round him in the hour of his greatness and of his 
peril, and remained bound by strong affection to 
him and to each other. One was missing, the 
eldest son, Oliver, who had fallen in battle for the 
cause, and whose image, as we know from Crom- 
well's last utterances, never left his father's heart. 
Among the rest the Protector's mother, ninety 



Cromwell. 131 

years old, was brought to a scene strange to her 
and in which she had little comfort, for every re- 
port of a gun she heard seemed to her her son's 
death, and she could not bear to pass a day with- 
out seeing him with her own eyes. We may 
trust the brief account of her end which is found 
among the dry state papers of the unimaginative 
Thurloe : — " My Lord Protector's mother, ninety- 
four years old, died last night. A little before 
her death she gave my lord her blessing in these 
words : c The Lord cause His face to shine upon 
you and comfort you in all your adversities, and 
enable you to do great things for the glory of 
your most High God, and to be a relief unto His 
people. My dear son, I leave my heart with thee. 
A good night.' " 

I have estimated Cromwell highly. I see no 
reason why his nation in his age should not in the 
terrible but fruitful throes of a revolution have 
brought forth one of the greatest of the sons of 
men. " A larger soul never dwelt in a house of 
clay," said one who had been much about his per- 
son, after his death, when flattery was mute. 
His greatness is not to be compared to that of con- 
querors. Ten years more of Alexander and we 
should have had ten more satrapies. Ten years 
more of Napoleon and we should have had ten 
more conquests at once profligate and insensate, 



132 Three English Statesmen. 

civilization put back ten degrees more, the barba- 
rous war spirit made ten degrees more powerful in 
the world. Ten years more of Cromwell and the 
history of England and of Europe might have 
been changed. In England we should have had 
no revival of the absolutist and Romanizing mon- 
archy of the Stuarts ; no resurrection of the Cav- 
alier party under the name of Tories ; no waste of 
the nation and disturbance of its progress by the 
renewal of that barren struggle; no restoration 
of the hierarchy ; and if an hereditary House of 
Lords, one at all events that could not have fan- 
cied itself Norman, and must almost inevitably 
have assumed more of the character of a national 
Senate. In Europe, there would have been no 
domination of Louis XIV. ; no extermination of 
French Protestantism ; probably no such crisis as 
that of the French Revolution. 

And now the Protector's foot was on the thresh- 
old of success. His -glory, the excellence of his 
administration, his personal dignity and virtues 
were founding his government in the allegiance of 
the people. The friends of order were beginning 
to perceive that their best chance of order lay in 
giving stability to his throne. Some of the great 
families, acting on this view, had connected them- 
selves by marriage with his house. His finances 
were embarrassed ; but he was about again to 



Cromwell. 133 

meet a Parliament which would probably have 
voted him supplies and concurred with him in 
settling the constitution. His foot was on the 
threshold of success ; but on the threshold of suc- 
cess stood Death. It was death in a strange form 
for him : for after all his battles and storms and 
all the plots of assassins against his life, this ter- 
rible chief died of grief at the loss of his favorite 
daughter and of watching at her side. 

Up that steep and slippery path of worldly 
greatness, so dangerous to the simplicity of faith 
and virtue, the religious farmer of Huntingdon- 
shire had wandered far away from the Puritanism 
of his youth. He felt it, and when his end was 
near he asked his chaplain whether those who 
had once been in a state of grace could fall from 
it. ' He was assured that they could not. Then 
he said, " I am saved, for I am sure that I was 
once in a state of grace." The Calviriistic formula 
has become obsolete for most of us : but we may 
still trust that he who has once sincerely devoted 
himself to God's service is not often allowed to 
become an enemy of God. 

At the time of his installation, the Protector 
had executed the power given him by Parliament 
of naming a successor. He had sealed up the pa- 
per and addressed it to Thurloe, but had kept 
both the. paper and its secret to himself. In his 



134 Three English Statesmen. 

last illness, at Hampton Court, he sent to London 
for the paper, telling the messenger that it was 
on his study-table at Whitehall; but the paper 
could not be found. Whose name did it contain \ 
I doubt not, that of Richard Cromwell. Perhaps 
the Protector's memory had failed him, and he 
had really destroyed the paper, still expecting 
that Richard would succeed not as Protector un- 
der the power of nomination, but by act of Par- 
liament as hereditary king. Nor do I see any rea- 
son to question Thurloe's statement -that the Pro- 
tector named Richard his successor by word of 
mouth just before he died. What else was to be 
done 3 Richard was weak, as his father must too 
well have known ; but he was popular and blame- 
less, and had the shadow of hereditary right. 
Henrv Cromwell was a man of mark as well as 
of worth, but not of mark enough to bear the bur- 
den unsupported by any other claim. Among 
the generals there was not one to be thought of 
since Ireton was gone. We know the rest. How 
military ambition broke loose: how anarchy en- 
sued. Anarchy, not Cromwell's government, 
brought on the restoration. At last the nobler 
spirit of the nation rose again. But the Revolu- 
tion of 1688 was an aristocratic revolution ; and 
there were other interests for which men had 
given their lives at Marston and Naseby, and 



Cromwell. 135 

with which, when Cromwell died before his time, 
all was over for many a day. 

All was over here, and once more there was 
an illustration of the frailty of systems and insti- 
tutions w^hich depend on a single life. But the 
counsels of Providence never depend upon a sin- 
gle life. Just as the great struggle was com- 
mencing in England, a little bark put forth on 
the Atlantic, unnoticed amidst the great events 
and the great actors of the time. Its passengers 
were Puritan peasants, hunted out of their homes 
by the Anglican hierarchy and its persecuting 
agents. It bore English Democracy, safe beyond 
the reach of the English reaction, to the shores 
of the New World. There, too, it has encounter- 
ed its old foes, the enemies of liberty, both of 
body and soul. But there it has triumphed : it 
has triumphed for itself, and it has triumphed 
for us all. 




TT. 



Qifyo 




m. 

PITT.— I. 

The European movement which ended in the 
French Revolution, like that which ended in the 
Reformation, like all great movements of human- 
ity, was complex in its nature. It was at once 
religious and political, and it extended to all the 
other parts of human life. In religion it was 
almost entirely critical and destructive. To our 
generation was left the heavy task of renovating 
faith. The religion of Rousseau, indeed, proved 
itself the strongest among the elements which 
struggled for mastery in the Revolution. We 
can understand how at the time it breathed in its 
freshness like the breath of morning into the 
feverish atmosphere of French life. But it was 
merely a bastard Christianity, emotional, senti- 
mental, based on no conviction. The great serv- 
ice done to religion during the eighteenth cen- 
tury was the advancement of toleration, to which 
Frederic the Great, tyrant as he was in politics, 
was a real friend ; though it was the toleration 



14° Three English Statesmen, 

of indifference, not the toleration of those who, 
with deep convictions, and because they have 
deep convictions, reverence conscience as the 
source, and liberty of conscience as the sole guar- 
antee, of truth. In the political sphere also the 
movement was merely destructive ; it pulled 
down feudalism without building up any thing 
in its place, and it has left European society 
generally in a chaotic state, from which the na- 
tions have sought refuge in democratic despotism, 
pending the evolution of a sound and permanent 
order of things. Two political ideals, however, 
this century produced; the half-classical, half- 
Christian Eepublicanism of Rousseau, and the en- 
lightened and beneficent despotism, having its 
imaginary type in China, which was the Utopia 
of Voltaire. In jurisprudence and political econ- 
omy, on the other hand, there were positive and 
great results : in jurisprudence, the reforms of 
law, especially the law of succession to property 
and the penal code, of which the Code Napoleon 
is the most scientific embodiment, though the 
philosophy of the previous century was the 
source ; in economy, free trade, and all the bene- 
fits which the world has received from the princi- 
ples enunciated by Hume, Turgot, and, greatest 
of all, Adam Smith. 

The first part of Pitt's life — that part which 



Pitt. 141 

forms the subject of this evening's lecture — is a 
product of the economical, and in some measure 
also of the political, part of this European move- 
ment, limited by the conditions imposed on the 
leader of an aristocratic assembly and a minister 
of the English crown ; the second part, which 
will form the subject of the following lecture, is 
a -product of the reaction against the religious 
and political part of the same movement when it 
had arrived at its revolutionary crisis and over- 
turned the French Church and Throne. During 
the first part of his life, Pitt is to be classed with 
the philosophic and reforming kings and minis- 
ters before the Revolution, whose names ought 
not to be forgotten, though the Jacobins chose to 
call the year of their frenzy the year One ; with 
Joseph II. ; with Pombal, Aranda, and Choiseul, 
the overthrowers of Jesuitism ; with Tanucci, 
with Leopold of Tuscany, with Turgot, with Fred- 
eric of Prussia, and with Catherine of Hussia, so 
far as Catherine and Frederic were organs of phi- 
losophy and reform. During the second part, he 
tends, though he does not actually sink, to the 
level of the Metternichs, the Polignacs, the Perce- 
vals, and the Eldons. The Pitt of my present 
lecture and the Pitt of my next stand in strong 
contrast to each other, though the connection is 
quite intelligible and signally illustrates the 



142 Three English Statesmen. 

power of circumstances over any but the strong- 
est men. The same change is seen in the lives 
of Joseph and Catherine and other reformers in 
high places, who, when the Eevolution came, 
found out that their trade was that of king. It 
is seen in the English aristocracy, the more intel- 
lectual of whom had, like the French aristocracy, 
been affecting scepticism and Republicanism, as 
we may learn from Horace Walpole, who is al- 
ways throwing out light Voltairian sentiments 
and cutting off the head of Charles I. This even- 
ing we speak of the happier Pitt, of him whose 
monuments remain in free trade, an improved fis- 
cal system, religious toleration, the first steps to- 
ward colonial emancipation, the abolition of the 
slave trade, the condemnation of slavery. An- 
other evening we shall speak of the Pitt whose 
monuments remain in six hundred millions of 
debt, and other evils political and social, of which 
the bitter inheritance has descended to us and 
will descend to generations yet to come. 

William Pitt was born beneath a roof illus- 
trious, but not likely to give birth to an apostle 
of economical reform. What the inglorious fru- 
gality of Walpole had saved, Chatham had squan- 
dered in victory ; and he had added a heavy bur- 
den of debt besides. But the father bequeathed 
to his child the example of purity, of patriotism, 



Pitt. 143 

of a high aspiring spirit, which soared, if not to 
the summit of political heroism, at least far above 
the place-hunters and intriguers of the time. He 
bequeathed to him also of his eloquence, not the 
incommunicable fire, but so much as assiduous 
culture under a great master could impart, and 
sent him into public life a youthful prodigy in 
the accomplishment by which we choose our 
statesmen. From the conversation of Chatham 
and of Chatham's friends, Pitt, who was brought 
up at home, must also have learned much ; and 
thus his parliamentary maturity at twenty-one, 
though a wonder, is not a miracle. 

I have noticed that Pitt was brought up at 
home. He was nevertheless no milksop. We 
complacently accept it as a full set-off against all 
the evils of public schools, that they make boys 
manly. It is easy to see how by cutting boys off 
from intercourse with men and women, and con- 
fining them to the society of boys, you may make 
them hard ; but not so easy to see how you can 
make them manly. Pitt brought up in the house 
of Chatham is, of course, too exceptional a case to 
reason from : but no want of manliness, either of 
mind or character, was seen in this boy when he 
became prime minister at twenty-four. 

He, however, went to Cambridge at fourteen, 
and stayed there seven years, during which he 



144 Three English Statesmen, 

* was regular and read hard, owing, it may "be, 
partly to the weakness of his health, which by 
debarring from physical sports and enjoyments, 
has perhaps turned not a few men into the path 
which leads to intellectual greatness. We are 
beginning to know the power of education, and 
the significance of the question, what sort of cul- 
ture it was that was undergone by a future chief 
of the state. The classics, a school at once of taste 
and of the political character formed by a rather 
narrow and heathen love of liberty, were the 
staple of Pitt's training, as they had been those 
of the English statesmen before him. To these 
he added the discipline of mathematics, some 
jurisprudence, some experimental philosophy, and 
a good deal of general literature, including history. 
Historical philosophy was not then in exist- 
ence : it might have taught him, the destined 
ruler of his country at the epoch of the French 
Revolution, to view with intelligence and meet 
with calmness the tremendous phenomena of his 
time. But above all he read the work, then new 
and unknown to his elder rivals, of Adam Smith, 
to which, in his great budget-speech of 1792, he 
referred as furnishing the best solution to every 
question connected with political economy and 
with trade. Pitt was Aclam Smith's first power- 
ful disciple. And from this source he drew not 



Pitt. 145 

only the principles of his commercial reforms and 
his "budgets, but a talisman of command. The com- 
mercial and manufacturing interests were rapidly 
rising in importance, and with these interests Pitt 
alone of the party leaders had qualified himself to 
deal. The aristocratic statesmen, with their pure- 
ly classical training, seldom stooped to any thing 
so low as economy or finance. Fox avowed his 
ignorance of political economy ; he used to say he 
did not know why the funds went up or down, 
but he liked to see them go down because it vex- 
ed Pitt. Sir Francis Dashwood was thought 
good enough for the Chancellorship of the Ex- 
chequer, though a sum of iive figures was said to 
be an inscrutable mystery to his mind. The stu- 
dent of the " Wealth of Nations" might have 
learned, and perhaps he did learn, from it, other 
things besides those which he mentioned in his 
budget-speech. Free principles hang together, 
and Adam Smith is, in an unobtrusive way, the 
apostle of Democracy as well as of Free Trade. 

Pitt's tutor was Pretyman, better known in 
the annals of ecclesiastical rapacity by his later 
name of Tomline. This man seems to have done 
the classical and mathematical part of his duty 
well : Pitt at least was grateful to him, and 
gorged him — to satiate him was impossible — 
with preferment, till George III. cried " Hold, 



146 Three English Statesmen, 

enough." Tomline thus enriched, provided with 
the means of enriching his whole tribe, and hav- 
ing inherited a private fortune besides, subscribed, 
among others, £1,000 toward the payment of 
Pitt's debts, which sum he afterward tried to get 
repaid to him by the nation. 

Bad physicians advised the stripling to drink 
port, the panacea and almost the physical gospel 
of the age ; and he followed their advice with a 
vengeance. Hence disease and mortal languor in 
his prime; hence the constitution early decayed 
which succumbed to the blow of Austerlitz. Lord 
Stanhope — to whose most valuable biography, 
which forms the foundation of this lecture, let me 
here acknowledge my great obligations — Lord 
Stanhope says that Pitt was only once seen drunk. 
There are traditions of a different kind. In all 
other respects Pitt's character, like that of his 
great father, was pure ; and though the wits 
might scoff at the idea that genius and morality 
could exist together, his purity gave him a great 
advantage in self-control, in conscientious indus- 
try, in dignity of bearing, in the confidence of the 
community — especially of the middle classes — 
over his chief rival, who, though he had a warm 
heart and noble sympathies, was a rake, a gam- 
bler, corrupt himself, and a corrupter of the youths 
about him. Of religion there was little to be 



Pitt, 147 

had in those days ; and of that little not mnch re- 
sided in Mr. Pretynian. Pitt was regular in his 
attendance at the college chapel. He also read 
theology with his tutor, and some would have us 
believe that he became a theologian at once most 
learned and most orthodox, armed at all points to 
maintain the Thirty-nine Articles against all here- 
sies, whether on the side of Popery or Dissent ; 
while, on the other hand, there is a tradition that, 
by his own avowal, Butler's " Analogy" raised in 
his mind more doubts than it solved, wherein he 
would by no means have been unique. But it is 
plain that he had not that strong and present 
sense of things unseen by which the noblest char- 
acters have been sustained. So far as integrity 
and real desire of the public good would carry 
him, he could go : but when the great trial came, 
the trial which called for complete self-sacrifice, 
the sustaining force was wanting, conscience yield- 
ed to ambition, and the son of the morning fell. 

As Chatham's son, Pitt entered public life as a 
Whig. But Whig, by this time, meant little 
more than Gruelf or Ghibelin. The Whigs were 
a party, and an illustrious party, while they were 
making the Kevqlution of 1688, and afterward 
while they were defending the Eevolution settle- 
ment against Louis XIV. abroad and the Jaco- 
bites at home. But that struggle over> they be- 



148 Three English Statesmen. 

came an oligarchy of great houses squabbling 
among themselves for the high offices of state. 
The long scene of degradation which ensued had, 
for a time, been broken by the rise of Chatham, a 
middle-class minister putting the oligarchy under 
his feet, though to do it he was obliged himself to 
connive at corruption, and allow a duke to do for 
his government the work which the great Com- 
moner abhorred. In this party government of 
ours, which we take for an eternal ordinance of 
nature, though it is but an accident of yesterday, 
every thing depends on the existence of a real 
division of opinion on some important question. 
When the great questions are for the time out of 
the way, party government degenerates into a 
chronic faction-fight between a connection which 
wants to get place and a connection which wants 
to keep it. At this time the great questions were 
out of the way, there was no real division of par- 
ties, and a reign of cabal and corruption naturally 
ensued. All the factions alike used power for 
class purposes ; the nation had little interest in 
their scuffles, and no hope but that by some acci- 
dent a man of heart and brain might get into his 
hands a measure of indejDendent power, and use it 
partly for the public good. 

Pitt took his seat when only just of age for the 
nomination borough of Appleby, and at once 



PitL 149 

came forward in debate. His command of round- 
ed sentences was already fearful; assuredly no 
youth ever wrote such stately dispatches to his 
mother. He gave the House without delay a 
taste of his oratorio training, and early showed 
his greatest gift as an orator, the power of lofty 
sarcasm, which, in a House not much in earnest, 
is so telling, both in its direct effect, and because, 
unlike open invective, it suggests a reserve of pow- 
er. Those stately speeches of his, with their long 
rolling periods, were, no doubt, very imposing 
when they were delivered with an imperial bear- 
ing and haughty gestures from the summit of 
Parliamentary command. But the best of them, 
and those best reported, can scarcely be placed 
in the small number of orations which deserve 
to live beyond the hour. They contain few 
memorable words. That fusion of reason in the 
fire of passion, the attribute of the highest elo- 
quence, is not there. They are the works of tal- 
ent, but not of genius. 

The war with the American Colonies had al- 
most run its guilty and disastrous course, and 
was drawing near its shameful end. The North 
ministry tottered to its fall. It was upheld only 
by the personal support of the king, who, like 
kings in general, was still for war. Pitt went 
into strong opposition. He denounced the war 



150 Three English Statesmen. 

with a vehemence which, we should have thought, 
would have seemed inexpiable to the king. He 
supported Burke's motion for retrenchment. He 
took up Parliamentary Reform warmly, and made 
the question his own. This he did with his guns 
leveled directly against the corrupt influence of 
the court — "an influence," he said, "which has 
been pointed at in every period as the fertile 
source of all our miseries — an influence which has 
been substituted in the room of wisdom, of activ- 
ity, of exertion, and of success — an influence which 
has grown with our growth, and strengthened 
with our strength, but which unhappily has not 
diminished with our diminution, nor decayed with 
our decay." The court was so discredited and de- 
tested that on his motion for a select committee 
Pitt was only beaten by 20. It has been remarked 
that the Reformers never had so good a division 
again till 1831. Pitt also voted for the motion of 
the Radical Alderman Sawbriclge to shorten the 
duration of parliaments. If this bright archangel 
of Toryism had sat long in opposition he might 
have become a minister of the Darker Power. 

North fell ; and over the prostrate favorite of 
the court Fox and Rockingham entered the royal 
closet by storm. On Rockingham's death Fox 
pressed the Duke of Portland on the king as first 
minister, but the king carried Lord Shelburne, 



Pitt. i $ j 

one of Chatham's old connection ; and Pitt, whose 
aspiring boyhood had refused office without a 
seat in the cabinet under Rockingham, came into 
Shelburne's cabinet at twenty-three as Chancellor 
of the Exchequer. The foot of Adam Smith was 
on the steps of power. 

The Shelburne ministry had to make peace 
with the Americans, and with their allies, France 
and Spain ; but on the preliminaries of peace the 
Government was overthrown by the profligate co- 
alition of Fox and North. Profligate that coa- 
lition was, not so much because it violated politi- 
cal principle, for none of these factions had much 
political principle to violate, as because it violated 
personal honor. Fox had spoken of North in 
terms which made an alliance between them, 
manifestly concluded for the sake of getting back 
into place, equally infamous to them both. The 
king struggled ; he turned to Pitt ; and the daz- 
zling offer of the premiership was refused by a 
far-sighted youth of twenty-three. Then the king 
was forced to go under the yoke ; but this time 
the nation was with him, and his defeat was a 
moral victory. 

A constitutional monarchy, according to the 
classic aphorism of M. Thiers, is one in which the 
king reigns and does not govern; in the less 
pointed words of Lord North, one in which the 



152 Three English Statesmen. 

king has only the appearance of power. This 
highly artificial arrangement — for highly artificial 
it is when we consider that the king is treated, 
even in onr addresses to Heaven, as though he were 
the real ruler, and we his obedient subjects — is 
commonly taken to be coeval with the monarchy of 
England. It came into existence a century and a 
half ago, and has not continued without interrup- 
tion since that time. The feudal kings, like the 
Saxon kings before them, not only reigned but 
governed, and were deposed, and sometimes put 
to death, if they governed ill. The Tudors were 
despots. The Stuarts tried to be. William III., 
though a foreigner, and dependent on the Whigs 
for his crown, was at the head of his own govern- 
ment, had no foreign minister but himself, at a 
time when foreign policy was the most important 
department, and vetoed the Triennial Act. Anne 
changed the government and the policy of the 
country at the whim of her waiting- woman. The 
first constitutional king was George I., a foreign- 
er like William, very stupid, which William was 
not, unable to speak English, with a Pretender 
across the water, and absolutely in the hands of 
his Whig patrons. George II. was pretty much 
in the same case, and accordingly he was only one 
degree less constitutional than his father. But 
George III., as he told Parliament in graceful 



Pitt. 153 

compliment to the shades of his ancestors, was 
born a Briton. " What lustre," responded the 
peers, " does it add to the name of Briton when 
you, sir, esteem it among your glories." Jacobin- 
ism was defunct ; and the last non-juring bishop 
died about this time, an apothecary at Shrews- 
bury, owning that Providence had declared itself 
for the Hanover line. Therefore, George III. was 
not constitutional : he wished not only to reign 
but to govern. He is surely not much to be 
blamed for that wish. Hearing a prayer put up 
every Sunday, that he might be enabled to rule 
well, he might not unnaturally conceive that it 
was a part of his duty to rule. Despotic ideas 
had been carefully infused by his mother and Lord 
Bute into a mind which the absence of any other 
culture left entirely open for their reception ; for 
never had a born Briton so un-British an educa- 
tion. The Parliament of that day was not a free 
Parliament, but an oligarchical and rotten-bor- 
ough Parliament ; and we might have sympa- 
thized with the Mug if he had really intended to 
override the factions, put the oligarchy under the 
feet of a national trustee, promote merit in the 
public service without regard to connection, and 
govern in the interest of the whole nation. Un- 
fortunately, George the Third's idea of merit was 

Lord Bute and Mr. Jenkinson, and his idea of gov- 

G2 



154 Three English Statesmen. 

erning in the interest of the whole nation was the 
American war. It was unlucky, too, if the new sys- 
tem was to restore purity, that it was itself support- 
ed by corruption ; and that in this corruption, 
and in the coarsest form of it — that connected 
with elections — the king himself took an active 
part. If any one, in his hatred of oligarchy, 
dreams of a patriot king, let him awake from that 
dream. Sooner than a patriot king, he will find 
an oligarchy ready to divest itself of power. 

George III. tried unconstitutional monarchy, 
first by Lord Bute, a walking-gentleman, and 
failed ; then by Lord North, a good man of busi- 
ness and a good parliamentary tactician, but pliant 
enough to submit to government by departments ; 
that is, a government in which the king was first 
minister, and the departments against their con- 
sciences carried on the king's American war. 
But the end of that war brought the system to 
the ground amidst a storm of odium ; and only 
the superior odium of the coalition could have 
given the king a third chance. A third chance 
he now had, and having twice before got hold of 
a tool who was not strong enough to be a minis- 
ter, he now got hold of a minister who was rather 
too strong to be a tool. 

The coalition deserved to fall, but not on the 
measure on which it fell. It had become necessa- 



Pitt 155 

ry for humanity, and for the honor of the country, 
to arrest the servants of the East India Company 
in their career of crime. The government brought 
in a bill taking India out of the hands of the 
Company and putting it into the hands of a board 
of seven commissioners to be named for the first 
time by Parliament and afterward by the crown. 
There can be no doubt that the measure was 
framed in good faith. Burke, whose zeal for 
Indian reform none will question, was its framer. 
Fox himself, with all his faults, was a true friend 
of humanity : let us honor his name for it, at a 
time when contempt for humanity and sympathy 
with cruelty is cultivated by feebleness as a proof 
of vigor, and lauded by public instructors as a 
healthy English tone. As, however, the majority 
in Parliament were to have the nominations for 
the first time, a cry was got up that the party in- 
tended, by the appropriation of overwhelming pat- 
ronage, to perpetuate itself in power. Set, up by 
Pitt and the opposition, this cry was swelled of 
course by the whole East Indian interest, which 
by buying rotten boroughs had made itself a 
great parliamentary power, and was beginning, 
in the secret counsels of Providence, to avenge, 
by its pestilential influence on English politics, 
the wrongs of the Hindoo. The great standing 
army, estranged from the ideas of English citizen- 



156 Three English Statesmen. 

ship and from reverence for English liberties, 
which is now being trained up in India, may per- 
haps one day carry farther the work of retribution, 
and teach people that they can not practice rapine 
in another country, even under pretense of propa- 
gating Christianity, and with the tacit sanction of 
their bishops, without entailing some consequences 
on their own. The king was in a paroxysm of 
rage and fear at the prospect of having so much 
power taken out of his hands. The bill, however, 
passed the Commons by a large majority, and 
was on the point of passing the Lords, when 
Lord Temple, who had before been carrying on a 
most unconstitutional correspondence with the 
king against the ministers, crept to the royal 
ear, and received from his majesty a paper to be 
handed about among the Lords in the following 
terms : " His Majesty allowed Earl Temple to 
say that whoever voted for the India Bill was 
-not only not his friend but would be considered 
by him as an enemy ; and if these words were 
not strong enough, Earl Temple might use what- 
ever words he deemed stronger and more to the 
purpose." The only words which could have 
been stronger and more to the purpose would 
have been some having reference to more substan- 
tial motives than affection for the royal j>erson. 
By a free use of this august document, the India 



Pitt. 157 

Bill was thrown out ; and the Coalition ministers 
fell, most of them in transports of rage, Lord 
North, with his usual good-humor, declining to 
get out of bed at twelve o'clock at night to give 
up the seals, and forcing the royal envoy, who 
came at that unseasonable hour, to have an in- 
terview with Lady North, as well as with himself. 
For a moment, Temple, the author of the plot, 
was secretary of state ; but he immediately van- 
ished under a cloud of mystery which has never 
been cleared away. Lord Stanhope is inclined 
to think that . Lord Temple having saved the 
monarchy by a back-stairs intrigue, wished to as- 
sure its salvation by getting himself made a duke; 
and that the king, faithful to first principles, even 
in this supreme hour of political extremity, would 
make none but royal dukes. A more obvious 
solution is that Temple, like most intriguers, was 
a coward, and that his heart failed him as he 
touched his prize. "What is certain is, that Lord 
Temple went to Stowe. Meanwhile the king 
had turned again to Pitt; and Pitt was prime 
'minister, and not only prime minister, but, as the 
rest of the cabinet were mere respectabilities, sole 
minister at twenty-four. 

Unluckily there was now a taint on his appoint- 
ment, which there would not have been if he had 
dared to accept the prime ministership) before. 



158 Three English Statesmen. 

Lord Stanhope defends the king and his partners 
in this transaction. He says the rules of the con- 
stitution were not then settled. The principle 
that the king was not to take notice of any thing 
depending in Parliament had been asserted, as I 
apprehend, against the Stuarts. But be this as it 
may, if the rules of the constitution were not set- 
tled, the rules of honor were ; and the rules of 
honor, while they permitted the king to dismiss 
his ministers openly and appeal against them to 
the country, did not permit him to stab them in 
the dark. But, says Lord Stanhope, Pitt at all 
events stands clear. His conduct was excusable 
perhaps ; but if the transaction was criminal, he 
was not guiltless. He was an accomplice after 
the fact. He screened Lord Temple in Parliament. 
He accepted the fruits of the intrigue. Afterward, 
he was himself called upon to confront the prej- 
udices of the king. George III. was cunning, 
and though he might quail before the haughty 
son of Chatham, he must have felt in his heart 
that Pitt had once been his accomplice. 

Then came the famous struggle of the young 
minister at the head of a minority, and without a 
colleague to support him in the House of Com- 
mons, against the superior forces and the veteran 
chiefs of the Coalition. The merit of Pitt in this 
struggle has been overrated. The Opposition 



Pitt. 159 

made him a present of the victory. They should 
have proceeded not passionately but vigorously 
against Temple, and treated Pitt with cool for- 
bearance, so as to avoid making him an object of 
national sympathy. They proceeded passionately 
but by no means vigorously against Temple, and 
they assailed Pitt with a ferocity which arrayed 
the sympathies of all men on his side. The fact 
is, however, that Pitt played a winning game 
from the beginning. The numbers of the majori- 
ty in the house were no measure of their hold on 
the country. The nation was weary of cabals 
which bandied power from one set of place-hunt- 
ers to another. Its heart yearned toward the 
young, and as it hoped pure and patriotic, son of 
Chatham. The Tories wished the king to choose 
his own ministers. The few Radicals that there 
were hated the great Whig houses. The Coali- 
tion was hated by all. 

In the middle of the struggle the Clerkship of 
the Pells (a sinecure office with an income of 
£3,000 a year) fell vacant. The minister might 
have taken it himself, and Pitt was poor. He 
fancied that if he lost his place he should have to 
go back to the bar. But he used the windfall to 
redeem a pension which had been improperly be- 
stowed by the other party, thus placing his own 
purity in contrast with their corruption. As a 



160 Three English Statesmen. 

minister lie waged no war on great sinecures, and 
he held the Wardenship of the Cinque Ports him- 
self. But this act proved at least that he was 
playing a high game, and that he would not let 
his cupidity stand in the way of his ambition. 
He showed sagacity, too, in putting off the disso- 
lution, and thus giving the Opposition rope to 
hang themselves, and the tide of opinion time to 
rise in his favor. Even in the House, the Oppo- 
sition was at the last gasp; and when urged by 
its leaders to throw out the Mutiny Bill, it no 
longer answered the spur. A last effort was 
made by a devoted adherent in the falling hour 
of the great Whig houses. The day before the 
dissolution somebody stole the Great Seal. But 
the fortitude and resource of the young minister 
were equal to the occasion, and a new Great Seal 
was at once made. 

When Pitt at last went to the country, there 
was a rout of the Opposition never paralleled ex- 
cept when the Whigs, in their turn, threw the 
Tories to the reformed constituencies in 1832. 
The great majority with which Pitt returned to 
the House was a medley, in which high Tories 
were mixed up with Alderman Sawbridge and 
John Wilkes. But he rapidly gave it consistency 
by making his name the symbol of prosperity and 
sound finance, and by attaching commerce, whose 



Pitt. 161 

interests he alone understood, firmly to his "banner. 
Soon he was all-powerful, and the beginning of 
his reign is an epoch in our history. There had 
been no revolution. All the cabinet were peers 
except Pitt himself; and he was an earl's son. 
He had come into power by the personal favor of 
the king. He could do nothing against the king 
or his order. But with these restrictions, he wish- 
ed to rule for the public good. His intellect was 
probably not so high as that of Turgot, but it 
was more practical: and his task was not, like 
that of Turgot, almost hopeless. Bright years, 
years bright for himself — and, on the whole, bright 
for his country — lay before him. Such a part 
can scarcely ever be played again. In ordinary 
times, connection and experience must rule. But 
it is possible that, under certain circumstances, the 
House of Commons may once more weary and dis- 
gust the nation; and that a statesman of high 
bearing and known public spirit may once more 
appeal with success from cabal and faction to the 
heart of the people. 

The highly aristocratic composition of Pitt's 
cabinet is a proof that there had been no revo- 
lution : it has also been justly cited as one of the 
many confutations of the theory that the Tories 
are less oligarchical than the Whigs. Under the 
influence of this theory, Lord Stanhope, a moder- 



1 62 Three English Statesmen, 

ate Tory, sometimes lapses into language funda- 
mentally democratic. "In 1784 the independent 
freeholders of Yorkshire boldly confronted the 
great houses" — this is an appeal to a dangerous 
spirit, unless care is taken to insert " Tory" before 
" freeholders," and " Whig" before " great houses." 
The fact seems to be that the Tories being, 
through some cause unexplained by political 
science, rather more stupid than the Whigs, have 
been rather more often obliged to take adven- 
turers into pay ; but they do this for oligarch- 
ical purposes, and an oligarch is not the less an 
oligarch because he keeps a bravo. 

The young conqueror sullied his triumph by 
most ungenerous conduct to his rival on the sub- 
ject of the Westminster Scrutiny. He had the 
mortification, as deserved as it was bitter, of find- 
ing himself at last placed in a minority by the 
more generous feeling of his own followers. In 
one of these debates, which, in spite of the aristo- 
cratic character of the speakers, were as rancorous 
and personal as any thing in an American Con- 
gress, Fox made a really great speech, in which 
he read his young rival a well-merited lecture on 
the expediency of moderation in the use of victory. 
Nothing can exceed the pertness and bad taste of 
Pitt's reply — "I am not surprised if he should 
pretend to be the butt of ministerial persecution ; 



Pitt. 163 

and if, by striving to excite the public compassion, 
lie should seek to reinstate himself in that popu- 
larity which he once enjoyed, but which he so un- 
happily has forfeited. For it is the best and most 
ordinary resource of these political apostates to 
court and offer themselves to persecution, for the 
sake of the popular predilection and pity which 
usually fall upon persecuted men; it becomes 
worth their while to suffer for a time political 
martyrdom, for the sake of the canonization that 
awaits the suffering martyr ; and I make no doubt 
the right honorable gentleman has so much pen- 
etration, and at the same time so much passive 
virtue about him, that not only would he be glad 
to seem a poor, injured, persecuted man, but he 
would gladly seek an opportunity of even really 
suffering a little persecution if it be possible to 
find such an opportunity." It must have been 
difficult for an opponent, or for any one indeed 
but a partisan, to help very cordially abhorring 
the gifted youth, from whose lips flowed unbidden 
such perfect periods as these ; especially when at 
his back was a mob of Tory squires, under the 
famous Eolle, hooting down the speakers on the 
other side — a habit perhaps not yet quite extinct. 
If there was any one in that assembly to whom 
the term apostate might with justice have been 
applied, it was the vehement advocate of Parlia- 



164 Three English Statesmen, 

mentary Reform as the great antidote to secret in- 
fluence who now stood, through a most flagrant 
exercise of secret influence, first minister of the 
crown. 

Pitt's great glories are economical and financial. 
In that sphere, as he touched neither prerogative 
nor privilege, royalty and aristocracy allowed him 
to have free play. They even formed his support 
in contending against the commercial tyranny of 
protection. 

He found the finances after the American war 
and the North administration in a desperate 
state. There were 14 millions of unfunded debt ; 
exchequer bills were at 20 discount ; consols were 
at 56. The customs were so laid on that the 
smuggling trade in tea was double the lawful 
trade in amount. The pupil of Adam Smith set 
all this right, brought income by bold taxation to 
a level with expenditure, and applying the prin- 
ciple which he was the first to grasp — that reduc- 
tion of duties will increase revenue by increasing 
consumption — transferred the gains of the ^mug- 
gier to the national exchequer. He was at the 
same time enabled to do away with a number of 
places in the customs and excise, and thereby 
not only to reduce the national expense, but to 
stanch some of the sources of corruption. He 
thus, in spite of some occasional waste in anna- 



Pitt. 165 

ments, the debts of the Prince of Wales, and the 
voracity of the civil list, turned deficit into sur- 
plus, and saved England perhaps from a crash 
like that to which deficit was hurrying France. 
He was also the author of the reform which put 
up loans to the highest bidder, instead of making 
them government patronage, with a toll to cor- 
ruption. 

Adam Smith had denounced funding. His pu- 
pil, when obliged to borrow, borrowed in the five 
rather than in the three per cents, to keep down 
the capital debt and improve the chance of pay- 
ing off. He had not read Lord Macaulay, who 
from the growth of suburban villas " embosomed 
in gay little paradises of lilacs and roses," proves 
that a funded debt of eight hundred millions is no 
burden to the nation. He had not learned that in 
the case of a national debt, debtor and creditor are 
the same, so that, as it seems, we might as well 
simplify the transaction by the use of the sponge. 
Still less, probably, had he, like Lord Macaulay, 
discerned the recondite truth, that the practice of 
fighting with soldiers hired at the expense of pos- 
terity, which removes the last restraint on war, is 
favorable to the ascendancy of intellect over force. 
He might have asked Lord Macaulay, if a nation- 
al debt was a blessing, why it should not be 
doubled ? 



1 66 Three English Statesmen. 

In his anxiety to reduce the debt Pitt was 
caught by the project of a sinking fund. When 
national debts grew heavy, various projects were 
devised in different countries for conjuring them 
away without the unpleasant process of paying. 
The Mississippi scheme and the South Sea scheme 
were among the number. Tampering with the 
currency was a coarse expedient. The simplest 
was that of the French finance minister, Abbe 
Terrai, who repudiated 'fifty per cent, and proved 
that the glory of repudiation is not monojDolized 
by republics. The sinking fund was a project for 
conjuring away the debt by the magic of com- 
pound interest. People think that money at com- 
pound interest grows of itself like a plant. But 
compound interest, in the case of individuals, is 
merely compound savings re-invested, and com- 
pound diversions of capital from other investments. 
In the case of a national sinking fund it is com- 
pound payments made by the nation to itself. Of 
course, as soon as the question arises between far- 
ther borrowing, perhaps at a high rate of inter- 
est, for some pressing emergency, and dipping into 
the sinking fund, the sinking fund goes to the 
wall. There are only three courses for nations ) 
which have run into debt — to bear the debt for- ) 
ever, to become bankrupt, or to remain at peace, 
retrench and pay. 



Pitt. 167 

It does seem,* however, that a nation ought to 
take advantage of its immortality, and to borrow 
on terminable rather than on perpetual annui- 
ties. To the mortal creditor there is no difference 
between an annuity for the longest span of mortal 
interest and an annuity forever. To the immor- 
tal nation there is, between a burden for a centu- 
ry and a burden forever, all the difference in the 
world. 

Destiny mocks the hopes of man. This is the 
minister of whom it was too truly said — "Mr. 
Pitt's memory needs no statues. Six hundred 
millions of irredeemable debt are the eternal rec- 
ord of his fame." He ought, from his early stud- 
ies and experiences, to have felt more strongly the 
injustice of laying burdens on other generations 
without their own consent. In barbarous ages, 
people when they went to war fought themselves. 
Civilization taught them to hire, impress, or kid- 
nap other people to fight for them. Still there 
was a check on war while those who made it had 
to pay. Taxation of the present was confined 
within narrow limits; it provoked unpleasant 
outcries, sometimes it provoked resistance. So the 
expedient was hit upon of taxing the mute and 
unresisting future. The system was perfected by - 
degrees. At first the' government only anticipa- 
ted payments which they might, with some color 



1 68 Three English Statesmen. 



<b 



? 



or reason, call their own. Then they mortgaged 
particular sources of revenue. Funding with us 
dates from William III. ; hence to the author of 
the great Whig epic, of which William is the 
Achilles, the system seems all lilacs and roses. 

Pitt's financial speeches were as notable as his 
budgets. Inferior, no doubt, in knowledge to 
those of Peel, they are superior in form, which is 
something when people are to be instructed on a 
subject to most men at once repulsive and obscure. 

In the mind of Pitt, as in that of Adam Smith, 
as in that of Cobden, as in the councils of Provi- 
dence, free trade was connected with a policy of 
peace and good-will among nations. Pitt, too, 
was " an international man." Since the religious 
wars of the sixteenth century, hatred had been 
the law of Christendom. International malignity 
had been organized under the name of the Bal- 
ance of Power. Each nation had thought itself 
prosperous just so far as it could prevent the 
prosperity of others. Hence protection, the colo- 
nial system, and commercial as well as diplomatic 
wars. Chatham's glory had been bound up with 
these notions, especially with the notion of eter- 
nal enmity between England and France. But 
Chatham's son, enlightened by a better teacher, 
commenced the work of healing, through free 
commercial intercourse, the divisions of Chris- 



Pitt 169 

tendom. The precursor of Cobden, lie carried, 
against strong opposition, a commercial treaty 
with France. Fox was a man of larger sympa- 
thies than Pitt, and if he had been in power 
would probably have been on the whole a better 
foreign minister ; but party, sacred party, hurried 
him and his liberal friends into denouncing the 
treaty on the most illiberal grounds of interna- 
tional jealousy. In defending it, Pitt combated, 
in language which Cobden might have used, the 
doctrine that France must be the unalterable 
enemy of Britain. He treated as monstrous, and 
as founded neither in nature nor in history, the 
position that one nation could be the unalterable 
enemy of another. He called it a libel on socie- 
ty, as supposing the existence of diabolical malice 
in the original frame of man. He was obliged to 
pay some homage to the war spirit, as in truth 
does Adam Smith ; and he urges that whatever 
enriches us will, when the time comes, give us the 
sinews of war. But he returns to less equivocal 
ground in showing that the chances of war will 
be diminished when nations are bound together 
by free trade. The chances of war will be dimin- 
ished. Let us not, in the face of so many victo- 
ries of principle, honor, passion over mere inter- 
est, imagine that any bond of mere interest can 

do more. If to slake a fierce hatred or to uphold 

H 



170 Three English Statesmen, 

a great cause men will sacrifice their lives, much 
more will they for a time sacrifice the luxuries 
for which they are dependent on foreign trade. 
The only sure guarantee of peace is morality. 
The next greatest is not commerce but freedom, 
which puts down standing armies. A commer- 
cial treaty is a poor set-off against the mischief 
done by a military despotism, the great embodi- 
ment and consecration of the war spirit in the 
world : and if we were to truck our abhorrence 
of military despotism fox such a treaty, we should 
find — to put the question on the lowest ground 
— that we had bought our mess of pottage far too 
dear. 

Adam Smith had advocated the union of Ire- 
land with England. He had pointed out that 
free trade with England would far more than 
make up to Ireland for the increase of taxation — 
that by the union of his own country with Eng- 
land, the Scotch people had been delivered from 
the Scotch aristocracy — that by the same process 
Ireland " might be delivered from a much more 
oppressive aristocracy, an aristocracy the most 
odious of all, an aristocracy of political and relig- 
ious prejudice, which, more than any other distinc- 
tions, animated the insolence of the oppressor and 
the hatred of the oppressed, and made the natives 
of the same country greater enemies than those 



Pitt 171 

of different countries ever were." At this time 
the relations between Ireland and England were 
such as could not be endured. The Protestant Re- 
publicans of the North of Ireland — they, mind, not 
the Catholics — taking advantage of the weakness 
of England after her reverses in the American war, 
and catching the infection of the American Revolu- 
tion, had risen in arms, under pretense of forming 
a volunteer army for the defense of the kingdom, 
and extorted legislative independence. The result 
was not, be it remarked, a Federal union, with a 
Federal Government having a definite province of 
its own, but two independent Parliaments under 
one crown; and the crown being constitutional, 
the two Parliaments were two sovereign powers. 
There was an hourly danger of a divergence pol- 
icy, even on questions of peace and war. At the 
same time, the Catholics remained excluded from 
the Irish Parliament, and Protestant ascendancy 
was thus left rampant, without any imperial con- 
trol. The consequence was that Ireland was 
ruled, and her policy kept in union with that of 
England by systematic corruption. Mr. Massey, 
the recent historian of this period, has found, 
among the original papers with which his work 
is enriched, a sort of chart of the Irish Parliament, 
drawn up confidentially for the guidance of 
Pitt:— 



172 Three English Statesmen. 

" H. H., son-in-law to Lord A., and brought 
into Parliament by him. Studies the law ; wishes 
to be a Commissioner of Barracks, or in some sim- 
ilar place. Would go into orders, and take a 
living. 

" H. D., brother to Lord C. Applied vfor office, 
but as no specific promise could be made, has 
lately voted in opposition. Easy to be had, if 
thought expedient. A silent, gloomy man. 

" L. M. refuses to accept <£500 a year ; states 
very high pretensions for his skill in House of 
Commons' management. Expects <£1000 a year. 
— N. B. : Be careful of him. 

" J. N. has been in the army, and is now on 
half pay : wishes a troop of dragoons, or full pay. 
States his pretensions to be fifteen years 5 service 
in Parliament. — 1ST. B. ; Would prefer office to 
military promotion : but already has, and has long 
had, a pension. Character, especially on the side 
of truth, not favorable. 

" B. P., independent, but well disposed to gov- 
ernment. His four sisters have pensions, and his 
object is a living for his brother. 

" T. P., brother to Lord L., and brought in by 
him. A captain in the navy. Wishes for some 
sinecure employment." 

On the government side were the members for 
eighty-six proprietary seats, the owners of which 



Pitt. 173 

had let theni out for titles, offices, or pensions. 
Sir Arthur Wellesley, at a later period, found 
that a zealous supporter of the government had 
been endeavoring to strengthen the Union by ap- 
propriating to his own use the gold provided for 
the collars of the order of St. Patrick, and putting 
copper in its place. Meantime famine, with pes- 
tilence in its train, stalked among the Irish people, 
who were reduced to the level of beasts in every 
thing except that they had the capacity of suf- 
fering as men. Does history afford a parallel to 
that agony of seven centuries which has not yet 
reached its close ? But England is the favorite 
of Heaven, and when she commits o|3pression it 
will not recoil on the oppressor. 

Pitt brought in a measure of free trade with 
Ireland which was intended no doubt to pave the 
way for union. Party, combined perhaps with 
some real ignorance and prejudice, again led the 
Foxites to the side of illiberality and wrong. Their 
liberalism at the best was, in fact, a narrow thing. 
Even Burke is found on this question fighting, an 
Irishman against Ireland, as well as an economist 
against free trade. And this time the Opposition 
had more than one power of evil on their side. 
In Ireland the jealous fears of ascendancy and job- 
bery were aroused. In England Protection was 
strong. Shall I tell it — eighty thousand Lan- 



174 Three English Statesmen, 

cashire manufacturers signed a petition against 
free trade ! All men are alike selfish, and till 
their selfishness is enlightened, all are protection- 
ists. Pitt fought gallantly against this host of 
prejudices and cupidities. He was beaten, but 
his power was too strong to be shaken by the 
defeat. 

In the article of corn, Pitt was himself a pro- 
tectionist. He is taxed with apostasy by Gren- 
ville, who had studied Adam Smith with him, and 
who was a thorough-going adherent of free trade. 
Probably the disturbing cause in his mind was a 
remnant of the war theory of international policy, 
which assumes that each nation is a garrison, and 
must be ready to feed itself in case of siege. 
However, the case against the Corn Laws then 
was not so strong as it is now. There was not 
then the vast manufacturing and mining popula- 
tion which Protection afterward compelled to 
live on the produce of an insufficient agricultural 
area, till it reached starvation prices, for the ben- 
efit of the landlords. 

But what became of Parliamentary Reform? 
At the opening of his ministry Pitt still hoisted 
reform colors — still professed his determination to 
press that which, as he said, " alone could entitle 
Englishmen to the appellation of free, and ensure 
to wise, to virtuous, and to constitutional endeav- 



Pitt 175 

ors a victory over factious ambition, and corrupt 
venality, the great question of Parliamentary Re- 
form." But the reformer grew very tame in the 
minister. When he did bring a measure forward 
it was not like his first, a liberal disfranchisement 
of rotten boroughs and redistribution of seats, the 
same which had been proposed by Chatham ; but 
a paltry plan for gradually buying up rotten bor- 
oughs, with the consent of the borough-mongers, 
and transferring the seats to counties. Even this 
was thrown out. The borough-mongers were 
shocked at the idea of treating the franchise as a 
matter of property to be bought or sold. The 
minister evidently did not put forth his power in 
support of the measure which consistency required 
him to propose ; and if he succeeded in persuad- 
ing his dearest friends that his heart was in it, 
that only shows that his dearest friends did not 
always see to the bottom of his heart. It must 
be borne in mind, however, .that when Pitt first 
came forward as a Parliamentary Reformer, at the 
close of the American war, there was great public 
discontent : he had made the nation contented, 
and now there was apathy. Yet had a good 
measure passed, the government and the nation 
alike would have felt a calm confidence in the 
soundness of their institutions, which would have 
prevented the panic dread of French infection, 



176 Three English Statesmen. 

and saved us from the revolutionary war. This 
was the accepted season, and it departed, not to 
be recalled. 

Sinecureisin, as I said "before, gross as it then 
was, Pitt scarcely attempted to attack, though 
with his customs' reforms a number of useless 
places fell. He even goes out of his way to com- 
mend Addington for bestowing a colossal sinecure 
on his nephew, a boy of sixteen. Perhaps he 
thought corruption good enough for Addington 
and kept purity for himself. But the task would 
have been a hard one ; it might even have cost 
him the power which he was using, on the whole, 
for the public good. In the last hour of the 
French monarchy, when the handwriting was on 
the wall, the reforming ministers found it impos- 
sible to reduce sinecures and pensions. The min- 
istry of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Eobert 
Peel estranged Tory support from them when 
they tried to save Toryism by the same means. 
It is vain to appeal to these people to give up the 
abuses in order to save the system. What they 
care for is not the system but the abuses. 

-There was one kind of corruption of which 
Pitt himself was the prince. In the course of his 
ministry he created or promoted in the peerage 
one hundred and forty peers. The great mass of 
these creations and promotions were not for merit 



Pitt 1 7 7 

of any kind, but for political support. If the 
Peerage of England intends, as it seemed from the 
language -held in the debate on life-peerages that 
it did intend, to set up a divine right against the 
nation, it had better not look into its own annals ; 
for taking those annals from the days of Henry 
VIII. and his minions, the real commencement of 
our present nobility (the feudal nobility having 
been destroyed in the Wars of the Roses), it 
would* perhaps be difficult to find a group of fam- 
ilies whose ennoblement had less to do with hon- 
or. The Stuarts sold peerages for money ; later 
peer-makers have sold them for votes. " Besides 
these appointments" — says Lord Stanhope, after 
giving an account of the accession of the Duke of 
Portland and his friends to Pitt's government — 
" beside these appointments, two or three peerages, 
and two or three places of less amount, gratified 
some less leading members of the same connection." 
And not only the " less leading members of the 
connection," who were thus gratified, but their 
descendants to the end of time, even though they 
might degenerate from the littleness of their 
sires, were to have a sacred and indefeasible right 
of legislating for a great nation. JSTot only so, but 
if they did not choose to leave their country 
houses or Newmarket for a division, they were to 

have the right of deciding by proxy the destinies 

112 



178 Three English Statesmen. 

of England. Is this to be classed among the 
anomalies which are no evils ? Is not every 
anomaly an evil which can not be thought of, 
which can not be mentioned to a foreigner, with- 
out shame % I call this use of peerages, and I may 
add that of baronetcies, a kind of corruption. It 
is the most potent of all kinds of corruption, when 
the persons to be corrupted are wealthy men, 
wealthy upstarts perhaps, craving, as such men 
crave, for hereditary rank. Even the social posi- 
tion which a minister can partly bestow, is no 
small source of influence in such a community as 
ours. Walpole's bribery-fund was perhaps £50,- 
000 a year : a peerage, it may be even a baronet- 
cy, to an ambitious millionaire is worth £50,000. 
Therefore, it is not wealth that will keep a mem- 
ber of parliament entirely above corruption. 
The only thing that will keep him entirely above 
corruption is honor. 

There can be no mistake as to the objects with 
which, in Pitt's day, the power of conferring peer- 
ages was used. " At the close of the elections," 
says Lord Stanhope, " the king showed his entire 
approval of his minister by the grant — perhaps a 
little lavish — of seven new peerages. The others 
were to baronies ; but one, Sir James Lowther, 
whose influence at Appleby had not been forgot- 
ten, was raised at once to higher rank, as Earl of 



Pitt. 1 79 

Lonsdale." I believe it would be putting the 
case mildly to say that the beneficent influence of 
Sir James Lowther at Appleby was the only 
public service by which he had merited public 
honor. Irish peerages, of course, were granted 
with even a more shameful prodigality than the 
English, just as the Irish pension-list received 
spies and cast-off mistresses, whose names on the 
English pension-list would scarcely have been en- 
dured. Pitt was on the point of making a loan- 
contractor an Irish peer because he had parlia- 
mentary influence in England. And this is call- 
ed "recruiting the peerage." So recruited, as 
Pym said in another great peer-making epoch, 
"honor itself would become a press." Perhaps 
Pitt was sensible of this danger, when, in framing 
the Regency Bill, he withheld from the Prince of 
Wales the power of creating peers, which would 
have been exercised under the advice of Fdx. 

Pitt's admirers plead guilty on his behalf to 
the charge of not patronizing men of letters. 
But patronage of men of letters was going out of 
fashion, and it was happy for literature that it 
was so. How can a statesman have leisure to 
discriminate literary merit ? And if he can not 
discriminate, how can we desire that he should 
patronize? Of course he can be told what 
writers are on his own side in politics, and he can 



180 Three English Statesmen. 

see who flatter him in their prefaces ; but this is 
not what learning or the public wants. A mu- 
nificent despot, such as Louis XIV., may foster a 
court literature : a munificent party-chief, such as 
the Whig leaders in the reign of Anne, may foster 
a party literature. A healthy literature needs no 
fostering but that of freedom. The best patron 
of intellect is an educated people. 

The newspaper press was not a great power in 
Pitt's day. In laying a stamp duty on newspa- 
pers, he speaks of it jestingly as an interest with 
which the members of the House would desire to 
stand well. If it had been a great power, he 
would have deserved gratitude for not tampering 
with journalists. 4 The anonymous press has 
done great service to reform, a service which 
nothing else could .have done. But if its inde- 
pendence should ever be lost — if its great organs 
should ever by patronage or social influence be 
made secretly subservient to the purposes of a dis- 
honest minister, if its chiefs should ever forget the 
sacredness of their mission in the " gilded saloons" 
of power — it would itself become the most potent 
and terrible, as well as the vilest, of all the en- 
gines of corruption. Political evil is Protean in 
its forms. New diseases, new dangers arise as 
civilization advances ; and the corruption of an 
anonymous press is by no means among the least. 



Pitt. 181 

The reform of tlie Libel Law, in the interest 
of liberty, received Pitt's cordial support. He 
was too great, at all events, to fear free criticism ; 
though we may guess what he would have said 
of the use of attacks on private character as a 
mode of carrying on political war. Of no other 
law reforms was he the author. Yet he had be- 
fore him a code which ought to have made any 
statesman a law reformer — a code truly and fear- 
fully aristocratic— a code which, for the lower 
orders, was indeed written in blood — a code 
which, while dueling and other offenses of persons 
of quality were practically overlooked, inflicted 
capital punishment with an almost unparalleled 
recklessness of human life on the petty offenses 
of the poor — a code which was the proof of a 
deeper barbarism than the native ferocity of the 
untutored savage. This work was left to Mack- 
intosh and Romilly. Unconsciously and invol- 
untarily perhaps Pitt contributed to law reform. 
He put Eldon at the head of the law. And with 
Eldon at the head of the law, reform could no 
longer be delayed. 

Humanity, however, honors Pitt as the con- 
stant and powerful opponent of the slave-trade. 
Perhaps he deserves in one respect to be honored 
above Wilberforce and Clarkson, inasmuch as 
the responsibility of the statesman is greater than 



1 82 Three English Statesmen. 

that of the private reformer. On this question 
he remained true to his better self, when on all 
other questions he had passed to the side of re- 
action. In 1799 he carried through the Com- 
mons a bill for the partial abolition of the trade, 
which, to his great grief, was thrown out by the 
Lords, on grounds which it must be left to the 
advocates of hereditary virtue to explain. His 
speech against the slave-trade in 1792 is justly 
regarded as about his best. A few years before, 
an action relating to a policy of insurance on the 
value of certain slaves had been tried in the 
King's Bench. The question was, whether the 
loss of the slaves had been caused by perils of 
the sea. A slave-ship, with four hundred and 
forty-two slaves, was bound from the coast of 
Guinea to Jamaica. Sixty of the slaves died on 
the passage from overcrowding, but in 'respect of 
these it was not contended that the underwriter 
was liable. The captain, having missed Jamaica, 
found himself short of water, and under the ap- 
prehension of scarcity, but before his crew and 
passengers had been put on short allowance, he 
threw ninety-six of the sickliest slaves overboard. 
A fall of rain now gave him water for eleven 
days, notwithstanding which he drowned twenty- 
six more of the slaves. Ten in despair threw 
themselves overboard, for a negro is human 



Pitt. 183 

enough to feel despair. The ship arrived in port 
before the water was exhausted. "Thus," says 
Mr. Massey, " one hundred and thirty-two human 
beings, if negroes are human beings, were willfully 
murdered." But the city jury found that they 
were chattels, lost by perils of the sea, and gave 
i£32 damages for each slave thrown overboard. 
The court granted a new trial on the ground that 
there was no such necessity for drowning the 
sesond batch of slaves as to constitute a loss by 
perils of the sea. There was not a thought, as 
Mr. Masey remarks, of proceeding against the 
captain or his crew for homicide. And this is a 
law-case of the nation which was conquering In- 
dia to introduce a higher civilization, and which 
justified its treatment of the Africans on the 
ground that they were incorrigible barbarians. 
One of the proofs of African barbarism adduced 
by the slave-traders was that a boy had been 
put to death by an African because a trader had 
refused to buy him as a slave. Pitt replies that 
the real reason why the boy had been put to 
death was that he had three times run away 
from his African master, who, by the native cus- 
tom, had to pay his value every time he was 
brought back to him, and failing to dispose of 
him to the English slave-traders, killed him in an- 
ger, or to avoid having to pay for him again. He 



184 Three English Statesmen, 

cites a law from the West India Statute Book, 
enacting that " if any negro or other slave shall 
withdraw himself from his master for the term 
of six months, or any slave that was absent shall 
not return within that time, it shall be adjudged 
felony, and every such person shall suffer death." 
He then bids the House compare the sudden 
wrath of the wild African, which slew the negro 
after the third offense, with the deliberate legisla- 
tion of the civilized planter, which puts him to 
death for the first, and say on which side the bar- 
barism lies. The answer must be of course that 
the barbarism lies on the side which has not En- 
field rifles but only bows and arrows. The slav- 
ery party of those days had not all the lights of 
science that the Anthropologists have now; but 
by the light of their own cupidity they had dis- 
covered the argument that the negro was by 
nature incapable of civilization. Pitt asks what 
a Roman senator would have said of the Britons 
— whether he would not have said with confi- 
dence : u There is a people that will never rise to 
civilization ; there is a people destined never to 
be free — a people without the understanding 
necessary for the attainment of useful arts, de- 
pressed by the hand of nature below the level of 
the human species, and created to form a supply 
of slaves for the rest of the world V 



Pitt. 185 

It was deposed on the side of the slave-owners 
that the middle passage was a very happy part 
of the negro's life ; the air of the hold was exact- 
ly suited to his tropical constitution; when on 
deck he made merry and danced his national 
dances. The privy council on inquiry found 
that, the better to secure the comfort of the 
negroes in their tropical hold, they were chained 
two and two together or fastened by ring-bolts to 
the lower deck ; that they were allowed one pint 
of water each daily under the line, with two meals 
of yams and horse-beans; and that after their 
meals they were made to take exercise by jump- 
ing on the deck in their irons under the lash. 
These were their national dances. There was one 
argument for the slave-trade which seems not to 
have been urged. The reformers did not at this 
time venture to propose the abolition of slavery ; 
and, of the two, slave-trading was rather better 
than slave-breeding. 

Of the Church Pitt seems to have had no con- 
ception, except as an establishment, the prizes of 
which were to be bestowed with some regard for 
piety and learning, but with a primary regard to 
personal and political connection. He gave Tom- 
line a fat bishopric and a fat deanery at the same 
time. One instance Lord Stanhope has found in 
which he resisted the solicitation of a powerful 



1 86 Three English Statesmen, 

man in order to reward a curate who had done 
his duty. He is disclosed to us in the life of his 
great friend Mr. Rose, coolly using a deanery as a 
political bribe, and enjoining his agent to see that 
the object bargained for is secured. No thought 
of purifying the Church as the spiritual organ of 
the nation seems to have arisen in his mind. A 
strange spiritual organ for the nation the Church 
then was. Lord S*fcanhope has given us the fol- 
lowing correspondence : 

The Bishop of Lichfield {Dr. Cormoallis) to Mr. Pitt. 

"Wimpole Street, June 10, 1791. 

" Sir, — After the various instances of neglect and con- 
tempt which Lord Cornwallis and I have experienced, not 
only in violation of repeated assurances, but of the strong- 
est ties, it is impossible that I should not feel the late dis- 
appointment very deeply. 

"With respect to the proposal concerning Salisbury, I 
have no hesitation in saying that the See of Salisbury can 
not be in any respect an object to me. The only arrange- 
ment which promises an accommodation in my favor is the 
promotion of the Bishop of Lincoln to Salisbury, which 
would enable you to confer the deanery of St. Paul's 
upon me. I have the honor to be, etc., 

" J. Lichfield and Coventry." 

Mr. Pitt to the JBishop of Lichfield. 

"Downing Street, Saturday night, June 11, 1791. 
" My Lord, — On my return to town this afternoon I 
found your lordship's letter. I am willing to hope that on 



Pitt 187 

farther consideration, and recollecting all the circumstances, 
there are parts of that letter which you would yourself 
wish never to have written. 

" My respect for your lordship's situation, and my regard 
for Lord Cornwallis, prevent my saying more than that un- 
til that letter is recalled your lordship makes any farther 
intercourse between you and me impossible. 

" I have the honor to be, etc., 

"W.Pitt." 

The Bishop of Lichfield to Mr. Pitt. 

" Wimpole Street, June 11, 1791. 
" Sir, — Under the very great disappointment which I 
have felt upon the late occasion, I am much concerned that 
I was induced to make use of expressions in my letter to 
you of which I have since repented, and which upon con- 
sideration I beg leave to retract, and I hope they will 
make no unfavorable impression upon your mind. 

"Whatever may be your thoughts regarding the sub- 
ject-matter of the letter, I trust that you will have the can- 
dor to pardon those parts of it which may r/ppear to be 
wanting in due and proper respect to you. 

" And believe me to have the honor, etc., 

" J. Lichfield and Coventry." 

Mr. Pitt to the Bishop of Lichfield. 

"Downing Street, June 12, 1791. 
" My Lord, — I have this morning received the honor of 
your lordship's letter, dated the 11th, and have great satis- 
faction in being able to dismiss from my mind any impres- 
sion occasioned by a paragraph in the former letter which 
I received from you. 

" "With respect to any farther arrangement, I can only 



1 88 Three English Statesmen, 

say that I have no reason to believe that the Bishop of 
Lincoln would wish to remove to Salisbury ; but, if he were, 
I should certainly have no hesitation in recommending 
your lordship for the deanery of St. Paul's. 

" \ have the honor to be, etc., 

" William Pitt." 

He that desiretli a bishopric, clesireth a good 
thing, but he that desiretli a bishopric and a dean- 
ery together, desireth a still better thing : so, no 
doubt, Dr. Cornwallis would have interpreted the 
Scripture. And, be it observed, the covetousness 
of the man, his meanness, his flagrant unworthi- 
ness to hold any spiritual office, make no bad im- 
pression whatever on Pitt's mind. The only thing 
that makes a bad impression on his mind is the 
injurious expressions touching himself. When 
these have been retracted, he is quite ready to 
promote Dr. Cornwallis higher in the Church. 

In another case we have an aspirant resorting to 
the ingenious artifice of writing to thank the min- 
ister for a blissful rumor which assigned to him a 
mitre then vacant. The minister has the pain of 
informing him that the rumor is unfounded. 

Lord Stanhope gives the correspondence be- 
tween Pitt and Dr. Cornwallis, with the warning 
that such a case could not occur now, A case so 
gross and palpable could not occur now. But 
may not things really just as bad occur now ? 



Pitt. 189 

May not a political tactician, and one to whom 
regard for spiritual interests could scarcely be 
ascribed except in jest, use spiritual preferment 
to purchase the political support of a great relig- 
ious party as cynically as ever the support of the 
lords of rotten boroughs was purchased by Pitt ? 
May we not, in return, hear religious adulation 
poured forth by Pharisaic lips to a patron whose 
only title to respect, in a religious point of view, is 
that he is not a Pharisee ? May we not see men 
who profess to be pre-eminently Christian sup- 
porting a policy pre-eminently un-Christian, be- 
cause its author puts ecclesiastical power into their 
hands? May we not see a religious connection, 
yesterday independent, to-day laying down its in- 
dependence and its influence for good in the ante- 
chamber of a minister ? May we not see divines, 
the authorized guardians of ^he truth, shaping 
their doctrine to the taste of the great bishop- 
maker of the day ? And if this is so, are we really 
much better off now than we were in the days of 
Pitt and Dr. Cornwallis ? 

The highest rule of duty which Pitt knew in 
the use of Church patronage he kept. He was 
stanch to his friends. He had high words with 
the king because the king insisted on making 
Moore, instead of Tomline, Archbishop' of Can- 
terbury. Tomline evidently thought that though 



190 Three English Statesmen. 

the country was in the midst of a great war, the 
government ought to have resigned. 

"Whether Pitt had been at all touched by the 
scepticism of his century or not, he had imbibed 
its toleration. He was always in favor of Ko- 
man Catholic Emancipation. He was not disin- 
clined to the repeal of the Test and Corporation 
Acts. But he consulted the bishops. It is won- 
derful that of fourteen bishops two were in favor 
of the repeal. We maintain a political hierarchy, 
and we must accept the natural results. It does 
not lie in the mouths of Non-conformists, who 
have political power in their hands and fail to 
use it for the assertion of religious freedom, to 
rail at the evils of the Establishment; for the 
blame of those evils rests on them. I say it in 
no spirit of irony, but with sincere conviction; 
the marvelous thing in the character of the state 
bishops is not the illiberality of the many, but 
the liberality of the few. Pitt's episcopal ad- 
visers erred under the almost irresistible pressure 
of the circumstances in which, not their own act, 
but the act of the community, had placed them. 
Yet could they have had their way, these ques- 
tions would long ago have been solved by civil 
war. Warned by his oracles — the keepers of 
the state conscience — Pitt resisted a motion for 
the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. 



PitL 191 

You can see that, like Peel resisting Catholic 
Emancipation and the repeal of the Corn Laws, 
he is struggling against the dawning light within 
him, as well as against the arguments from with- 
out. His reasoning is founded on the assump- 
tion with which we are now being made again 
familiar, that no man has any political rights, and 
that it rests entirely with the dominant party in 
the state to dole out to their fellow-citizens just 
as much of political freedom and justice as they 
may think compatible with the ascendancy of 
their own opinions and with the safety of the 
political arrangements by which that ascendancy 
is preserved. Such advantages as he gains are 
due to the weakness of his opponents, who, 
though their hearts were on \h& side of justice, 
had not yet learned, as indeed few public men 
have even now learned, to examine boldly the 
duty of the state in matters of opinion. The re- 
volting profanation of the sacrament, which the 
Test and Corporation Act involved, as it did not 
shock the clergy, naturally did not shock the 
man of the world. 

The commutation of tithes into a corn-rent 
was Pitt's only Church reform. It was destined 
mainly for Ireland. I have seen among some 
papers of Sir Robert Peel a picture of the levy- 
ing of tithe in a Catholic's farm-yard by a Prot- 



192 Three English Statesmen. 

estant parson, who is just seizing the tenth pig, 
while soldiers with fixed bayonets stand by to 
support the law. The picture is a caricature of 
course, but caricature itself could scarcely add 
deformity to the truth. Pitt, in his letter to the 
lord-lieutenant, hopes that the Irish clergy will 
take a sober and dispassionate view of the mat- 
ter; that they will understand how much easier 
it is for them, by persisting in an odious system, 
to imperil the government than for the govern- 
ment to uphold them ; that they will propose an 
accommodation, which, originating with them, 
would not be unbecoming. He appealed for a 
sober and dispassionate consideration of an angry 
question to men whose whole existence was a 
fierce conflict with a hostile nation. His plan 
was rejected, and he gained nothing but the 
credit with posterity of having been before his 
time. 

To pass from home government to the depend- 
encies, Pitt had thrown out the India Bill of 
Fox, but he could not help bringing in one of 
his own. The company's servants — their cupid- 
ity inflamed to the utmost by the sight of such 
gorgeous booty — had burst through the frail bar- 
rier which divides the rapacious trader from the 
robber, and were heaping up fortunes by violence 
and fraud, hardly paralleled, to borrow the words 



Pitt. 193 

of Mr. Massey, in the dark and bloody annals of 
conquest. Pitt was trammeled by Ms opposi- 
tion to Fox's measure, and by his alliance with 
the East India interest and the nabobs who sat 
for its rotten boroughs. The result was a half 
measure— the double government which sham- 
bled on in its awkwardness till the Sepoy Mu- 
tiny, by breaking up the army on which the do- 
minion of the company rested, and thus destroy- 
ing one of the two powers, gave the system a 
final blow. The abuse of Indian patronage, the 
dread of which had been worked against Fox's 
bill, was not avoided by that of Pitt. The cor- 
rupt dominion of Dundas in Scotland was main- 
tained to a great extent at the expense of the 
Hindoo. And we soon find Lord Sydney, an 
honorable member of the cabinet, complaining 
of the monopoly of army appointments in India 
by Scotchmen; of " insatiable ambition," "sordid 
avarice," "base work," and "the character of men 
whom he had imprudently treated with great 
openness, but who should never come into his 
room again while he had a bolt to his door." 
Perhaps there is still something in the feelings 
of Scotchmen, even of pious Scotchmen, toward 
the oppressed people of dependencies, which 
savors of the old time. It may be doubted, 
however, whether the failure to incorporate India 



194 Three English Statesmen. 

completely with England ought to be reckoned 
among the demerits of the bill. Writers on the 
government of dependencies have not sufficiently 
considered the consequences of the relation to the 
character of the imperial country. The effect of 
incorporating a vast despotism like India with 
a free nation perhaps remains yet to be seen. 
There is a poison which is imbibed daily though 
it is not perceived ; which was imbibed, though 
it was not perceived, by Imperial Spain. 

In the case of Hastings, the accusers being 
Whigs, the Tories of course took the part of the 
accused, with whom, indeed, as a representative 
of arbitrary and sanguinary violence, they had 
sympathies of a more specific kind. Pitt, as is 
well known, turned round in the middle, and to 
the dismay of the mass of his party, who voted 
against him, carried the impeachment by the 
votes under his absolute command. His conver- 
sion was so mysterious that it was ascribed to 
jealousy of Hastings. But we may safely regard 
it as conscientious, and as having been delayed 
only by his inability to look thoroughly into the 
case at an earlier stage. Hastings was a great 
criminal, and one who, for the honor and in the 
highest interest of the country, ought to have 
been brought to justice; though he might have 
pleaded, in extenuation of his guilt, the evil ne- 



Pitt. 195 

cessities of conquest, for which his masters were 
more responsible than he. He was absolved, and 
afterward honored, because his crimes had served, 
or were supposed to have served, the aggrandize- 
ment of England. And if the aggrandizement 
of England is a redeeming motive before God 
as well as before the House of Lords, all, no 
doubt, will be well. Then there will be no 
danger of retribution, though our press, reflecting 
too faithfully the morality of the nation, should 
preach, under the thin disguise of rhetoric, doc- 
trines which in their naked form could be avow- 
ed only in the cavern of a bandit or on the deck 
of a buccaneer. 

Hastings and his party complained, with some 
reason, of the length of a trial conducted by a 
tribunal the dilatoriness of which equaled its un- 
trustwor.thiness for the purposes of justice. It 
was about this time that a woman died in Devon 
County Jail, after an imprisonment of forty-five 
years, for a debt of .£19. 

Parliament, however, displayed in the case of 
Hastings a higher sense of justice and of the na- 
tional honor than it displays in cases of wrong 
done to the subject races in the present day. 
The conscience of the nation had not then become 
seared by the long exercise of empire ; a pervert- 
ed code of imperial morality had not had time to 



196 Three English Statesmen. 

grow up, nor had the plea that an act was done 
in the interest of the dominant race yet become 
familiar and persuasive to English minds. On 
these questions we grow worse; and we shall 
probably continue to grow worse till for us, as 
for the American slave-owner, the end arrives, 
and we find that neither the approbation of our 
press, nor the acquiescence of our state clergy, is 
the connivance of the Power which, after all, rules 
the world. 

Adam Smith had proposed that the colonies 
should be represented in the British Parliament. 
Such was his cure for the conflict between impe- 
rial supremacy and colonial liberty, which was 
gathering to a head while he wrote. At the 
time, it was answered that this plan would be 
impracticable on account of the distance. With 
regard to the Australian colonies, the same objec- 
tion would be fatal now. You could not, after a 
dissolution, wait till the returns to the writs had 
been made from Sidney and Melbourne, before 
re-assembling Parliament. But the more fatal ob- 
jection is that the colonies have national Parlia- 
ments of their own, and that to let them send 
members to the national Parliament of England 
also, and have a voice in our national questions, 
while we should have none in theirs, would in- 
volve a confusion of functions full of absurdity 



Pitt 197 

and injustice. If you have any common assem- 
bly for the mother country and the colonies, it 
must be a Federal Council, dealing with the in- 
terests of the empire apart from those of the sev- 
eral nations : and this Federal Council must in 
Federal questions be above the national govern- 
ment of Great Britain, an arrangement which 
Great Britain would never endure. A moral, 
commercial, and diplomatic union of all the com- 
munities of the Anglo-Saxon race, including what 
must soon become the greatest of those communi- 
ties, the United States of America, is no dream, 
and if a national policy is pursued, may be made 
a glorious reality. But a political union of all 
these communities, or of those still under the 
nominal rule of Britain, scattered as they are over 
the globe, is a dream, and one from which we 
shall soon awake. Colonial Emancipation, while 
the tie of affection remains unbroken, is the only 
mode of securing that to which we all alike cling, 
that of which we all alike are proud. There is 
no reason why it should not be accompanied 
with a mutual retention of the rights of citizen- 
ship, so that an Englishman might, to all intents 
and purposes, be an Australian in Australia, and 
an Australian be an Englishman here. There is 
no reason why the colonies should not keep the 
old flag. The only thing which need be given 



198 Three English Statesmen, 

up, and this Nature proclaims aloud must be 
given up, is the political dependence of a nation 
on one side of the globe upon a nation at the 
other. Toward Colonial Emancipation Pitt made 
the first step, still partly guided herein by his 
great teacher, who, though he had proposed a 
plan which was not feasible for the political in- 
corporation of the colonies with the mother coun- 
try, had placed their uselessness as dependencies 
in a clear light. The Canadas, which had re- 
mained ours when we lost the British Colonies in 
America, had hitherto been governed as depend- 
encies. Pitt now gave each of them a Parlia- 
ment of its own, and thus, in fact, made them sep- 
arate nations, though to complete the severance 
would have been a measure at once out of the 
range of his vision, and beyond his power. The 
people of French Canada being Catholics, their 
admission to political rights was, in fact, Catholic 
Emancipation. The good king and his spiritual 
advisers appear to have made no objection to this 
feature of the plan. Perhaps it was thought that 
Providence, for commercial objects, winked in a 
colony at that which it would have visited as im- 
piety at home. There is a beautiful plasticity in 
our political religion. Intent on producing an- 
other England beyond the Atlantic, Pitt provided 
for the endowment of a State Church, and for the 



Pitt. 1 99 

creation of a peerage in the colony. Ungrateful 
Nature has refused both boons ; though, in the 
plans now framed for Canadian Confederation, 
there is a proposal for a mock House of Lords, 
not hereditary, but for life, the proper materials 
for which the colonies, from the instability of 
wealth and the absence of any social distinctions 
there, will fail to furnish, and which, if it is set 
up, will, I venture to predict, in the end breed 
confusion. Pitt had no philosophy of history to 
teach him that progress is the law of things, that 
though the essence of religion and morality does 
not change, all besides is ever changing, that the 
scroll is not yet all unrolled, and that Providence 
does not mean merely to repeat itself over again 
in the new world. He did not know that feudal- 
ism had performed its part in the development of 
humanity, that of a school-master, to train society 
for a larger freedom ; that it was bound up with 
military aristocracy, the offspring of conquest, 
which with the age of conquest and military as- 
cendancy passes away ; that it was based on a 
tenure of land, which the English race had dis- 
carded from the moment when it set foot on the 
new shore. What is more, Pitt when he tried 
the experiment had not, like us, seen the experi- 
ment fail. 

JSTor is Pitt's sagacity much to be impeached 



200 Three English Statesmen. 

because, under an unhappy star, he founded Bot- 
any Bay. Leave Nature to herself and she will 
choose the germs of new nations well. Wise, be- 
yond the reach of human wisdom, in all her proc- 
esses, she does not forget her wisdom in this most 
momentous process of propagating humanity over 
its destined abodes. Careful in the selection, of 
the right seed for a plant, she is not careless in 
selecting the right colonists. Left to herself she 
selects the flower of English worth, the founders 
of New England ; when man undertakes to select 
for her, he selects the convicts of Botany Bay, and 
taints the being of future communities at its 
source with the pestilence of a moral lazar-house. 
But the severance of the American Colonies was 
supposed to be a fatal blow to the prosperity of 
England, which only the foundation of new colo- 
nies could countervail, though, as we all know, it 
proved an immense gain, and turned the driblet 
of restricted commerce into a mighty current of 
wealth. Our jails too, dens of the most hideous 
depravity, filth, and cruelty, called loudly for de- 
pletion, and the dream was a flattering one of turn- 
ing the felony of England into the virtue and in- 
dustry of other lands. Still mischief was done, 
mischief of which the traces are not wholly effaced 
yet. But I am falling into a repetition of what I 
have said on the subject of colonies elsewhere. 



Pitt, 20 1 

Toward tlie American Colonists Chatham's son 
inherited the feelings of Chatham. Not only did 
he, as a member of the Shelburne government, 
gladly take part in making peace with them, but 
he desired in matters of trade to treat them, to 
the utmost of his power, as though they were En- 
glishmen still. And they are Englishmen still, 
if the England which, notwithstanding all that 
the evil agents of a selfish faction have done to 
breed bitterness between us, her Colonists still 
love, will show that she still loves them. This 
was treason and revolution yesterday : it is ortho- 
doxy and Conservatism to-day. 

It is said of Sir Robert Peel by a French 
statesman, that he had no foreign policy but peace 
and good-will among nations. The same thing 
may be said of Pitt during the first ten years of 
his power. He was remarkably free from the 
vice of diplomacy. He did not meddle except 
when he was called upon to do so, and then he 
quietly and with dignity maintained the honor of 
the country. It is well for the nation when the 
chancellor of the exchequer is the most powerful 
man in the government, because his ambition is 
opposed to war. The son of Chatham, while he 
was himself, and before he became the organ of 
a panic-stricken and infuriated faction, was emi- 
nently a peace minister. In 1792, while all the 

12 



202 Three English Statesmen. 

world was arming, he was cutting down arma- 
ments; his army that year was only 18,000 men, 
and his army estimates only £1,800,000. "When 
shall we see such estimates again ? 

Once, indeed, the minister was led into making 
a demonstration against the aggrandizement of 
Russia, in which he failed to carry the nation 
with him. There are politicians who would say 
that he stood alone in his prophetic wisdom. 
Probably he would at the time have succeeded 
in exciting the nation more if India had then been 
to us what it is now, and the safety of the ap- 
proaches to it had been as great an object of so- 
licitude. The Crimean war must be set down 
partly to the account of India ; and so must the 
false bent given to our diplomacy in the East, as 
will appear when, in the question of the Eastern 
nationalities, Nature has asserted her power, and 
produced, in spite of diplomacy, Christian commu- 
nities which by a more genial policy we might 
have made our friends. This is not the place for 
a discussion of the Russian peril. Mr. Massey 
holds the usual language on the subject : " Russia 
had begun to unfold those gigantic schemes of 
aggrandizement which modern statesmen have 
justly regarded as menacing the independence 
and civilization of the continent with a new ir- 
ruption from the northern hive." The old irrup- 



Pitt 203 

tions from the northern hive were those of nomad 
hordes. They were in a word not invasions bnt 
vast migrations. The modern Russians, however 
backward, are a settled nation, and will scarcely, 
like the Goths and Huns of old, put their wives 
and children into their wagons and descend with 
their herds upon the south. The Christianity 
which ought to restrain their lusts of military 
aggrandizement is unhappily itself neutralized by 
a State Church, which, as usual, instead of being 
the reproving conscience, makes itself the servile 
organ of the passions of the government by 
which it is maintained. But it is in the govern- 
ment, not in the Russian people, that this lust of 
aggrandizement resides. In this case also the be- 
ginning of political freedom will probably be the 
end of military rapacity ; and, since the emancipa- 
tion of the serfs, the beginning of political free- 
dom can scarcely be far distant. The fear that 
Europe will soon be either Republican or Cossack 
does not seem to me chimerical ; but the fear that 
it will be Cossack does. 

The minister also met with a check in bring- 
ing forward a proposition, which was not his 
own but the Duke of Richmond's, for the forti- 
fication of the arsenals. Party came in as usual, 
regardless of the safety of the country when the 
paramount interest of faction was to be served. 



204 Three English Statesmen. 

But the feeling upon which party played seems 
to have been confidence in the sufficiency of the 
wooden walls. The nation might, at all events, 
and may still truly say, that government has at 
its command a great fleet, maintained at a vast 
expense to the nation, and that it is "bound, with 
this fleet, to maintain an ascendancy in the Brit- 
ish waters, which if it would do, we should stand 
in little need of fortifications. But the fleet is 
scattered in petty squadrons over the world, for 
the nominal defense of distant colonies and de- 
pendencies, and for the hollow pretense, which 
could not now be sustained six months after the 
outbreak of a great war, of dominating in the 
Mediterranean, The country is continually pour- 
ing millions into the naval estimates, only to be 
told that its own shores are defenseless, and that 
millions more must be spent in fortifying them 
against French invasion, 

As a member of Shelburne's government, Pitt 
had been called on to defend, among the other 
articles of the peace with America and her allies, 
the abandonment of the clause in the treaty of 
Utrecht, providing for the demolition of Dunkirk. 
North denounced the article, on the ground that 
though Dunkirk was no longer of real impor- 
tance, the presence of onr commissioners on the 
enemy's territory was to be desired, because it 



Pitt. 205 

perpetuated the memory of former victories, ex- 
alted the dignity of Great Britian, and humbled 
the pride of France. Such has hitherto been the 
code of honor among nations. Among men true 
dignity is inoffensive, and he who is most careful 
of the honor of others is thought likely to be 
most careful of his own. Shelburne, like Chat- 
ham and Stanhope — two ministers of spirit as 
well as sense — "before him, had proposed to give 
Gibraltar up to Spain for an equivalent. Three 
times round that barren rock had the waters — 
Nature's destined portal of peaceful commerce, 
and her destined highway of kindly intercourse 
among the nations of Christendom — been dyed 
with Christian blood and covered with floating 
agony. It does not command the entrance to the 
Mediterranean. It has made Spain our enemy in 
every war of the European Powers. When 
almost paralyzed by decrepitude, she dragged 
her feeble limbs again and again to the attack, 
that she might remove this stain on her escutch- 
eon, this eyesore of her honor. The recovery of 
it would be the greatest bribe that a military ad- 
venturer rising to power in Spain could offer to 
his countrymen : and perhaps the day may not 
be far distant when such a crisis may occur. But 
let us by no means exercise any foresight in the 
matter. Foresight is unworthy of a practical 



206 Three English Statesmen. 

nation. A passage m one "of Pitt's letters seems 
to indicate that he opposed Lord Shelburne on 
this occasion. But, if he did, it must be borne 
in mind that we had then no other station in 
the Mediterranean. Minorca had been lost: 
Malta was not yet ours. Pitt said " some naval 
station in the Mediterranean is absolutely indis- 
pensable, but none can be found so desirable and 
secure as Malta." If we cite great authorities, 
we must remember the circumstances under which 
they spoke. But again I am repeating what I 
have said more than once before. 

In the midst of his useful course Pitt was 
almost thrown out of power by the illness of the 
king, which, if it had lasted longer, would have 
made the Prince of Wales regent, and transfer- 
red the government to his friends; one of the 
many warnings to nations in search of a consti- 
tution not to embrace ours without considering 
all the liabilities of so peculiar and complex a 
machine. The Prince of Wales, partly from filial 
feeling, partly perhaps like D'Orleans Egalite, 
for the sake of another forbidden pleasure, flirted 
with Liberal principles, which, however, of course, 
lost forever their place in what he was fond of 
calling his heart, the instant that his foot touched 
the throne. The debates on the Regency Bill, 
under the guise of a great constitutional discus- 



Pitt. 207 

sion, were a scuffle for power between two fac- 
tions which had accidentally changed their posi- 
tions with regard to royalty for the monient, and 
got hold each of the other's cant ; so that if Pitt 
could say that he had un-Whigged Fox, Fox 
might have said that he had un-Toried Pitt. 
These scenes revealed on the critical eve of the 
French Revolution the scandals of Royalty — a 
king, in whom the ray of reason barely flickered, 
swaying the destinies of a nation — the princes 
mocking at the affliction of their father — the 
queen receiving with complacency the duelist 
who had nearly killed her detested child. Not 
long before had occurred tlie episode of the 
Prince of Wales and Mrs. Fitzherbert, in which 
the prince broke every law of honor, and put up 
his bosom friend to tell a lie for him in the 
House of Commons. But there are extenuating 
circumstances in this case. First, the prince, like 
all princes, had been sacrificed to the public good : 
he had never known equal friendship, heard the 
voice of truth, or learned self-control and honor 
in the school of other men. Secondly, his love 
for Mrs. Fitzherbert was undoubtedly deep and 
sincere; a lawful marriage with her might have 
been the means of reclaiming him. Thirdly, he 
had not made the laws which, in the case of royal 
marriages, sacrificed affection to policy; and, heir 



208 Three English Statesmen. 

to a kingdom as he was, lie might have envied 
the meanest servant in his train whose hand and 
heart were free. He was afterward married to 
a woman whom he had never seen, and the sight 
of whom caused him at once to call for brandy, 
while farther researches have revealed that he 
drowned the horrors of his wedding in an enor- 
mous potation of liqueur. His mother had "been 
called down from her nursery one afternoon to 
dine at table with the family, and introduced to 
a stranger, who after dinner led her into the next 
room, and went through the form of marriage 
with her as the deputy of the King of England. 
When she was brought to St. James's, never hav- 
ing seen her destined husband, she was going to 
fall down at the feet of the wrong man. 

The people showed their sympathy and their 
loyalty when the king recovered. They passed 
from mouth to mouth, and engraved on their 
rings and snuff-boxes the words of the honest 
Lord Chancellor Thurlow: "When I forget my 
king may my God forget me." They had not 
heard Burke's exclamation, "The best thing he 
can do for you," or the more pungent but highly 
improper comment of the graceless Wilkes ; nor 
had they seen Pitt run out of the House crying, 
" Oh what a rascal." In the course of the great 
struggle between the king's party and that of the 



Pitt. 



209 



prince, when the king's friends were holding a 
cabinet at "Windsor, as they rose to go, the honest 
lord chancellor's hat was missing. It was brought 
to him from the prince's room. 

And now the sun of Pitt's glory has reached 
its zenith. It declines toward the West and 
night. 




IV. 

P ITT. — II. 

\ 
An optimist view of history will not hold 

good, any more than an optimist view of nature. 
All will be well in the sum of things, but in the 
mean time calamities occur. No greater calamity 
ever occurred, no greater disaster ever befell the 
cause of human progress, as it seems to me, than 
the revolution which brought the Liberal move- 
ment of the eighteenth century to a violent crisis 
in France. Apart from the faults of political 
character, the want of self-control, the want of mu- 
tual confidence, the levity, and worst of all the cru- 
elty, which have marked all their revolutions, the 
French were from their circumstances, and from 
the evil training which they had undergone, quite 
unfit to take the political destinies of the world 
into their hands. The abuses of their own gov- 
ernment were so flagrant, the obsoleteness of their 
own institutions was so manifest, that the thought 
of caution and moderation was banished from 
their minds, and they were content with nothing 



214 Three English Statesmen. 

short of introducing a new order of things, a new 
political creation as it were, dating from the day 
of their revolt, which they sought to extend to na- 
tions unwilling to accept it, or unripe for a great 
change. They had no middle class accustomed to 
government, ready to take power into its hands, 
and furnish wise rulers to the state when the aris- 
tocracy had been overthrown. The peasantry and 
the populace of their towns were "brutalized to the 
last degree by ignorance and oppression. The 
court and the aristocracy were too utterly corrupt 
and effete to show any moral courage or attempt 
to control the crisis which they had themselves, 
by dallying with Liberalism and Scepticism, help- 
ed to bring on ; they threw the reins on the neck 
of a frenzied people, and betook themselves, for the 
most part, to ignominious flight. In the whole 
nation, though there were generous aspirations, 
there was no faith. The state superstition had 
been renounced by all men in their hearts, even 
by its state supporters, even by its own priests : 
but its political ascendancy had been the upas 
shade which had forbidden any other religion to 
grow. The creed of Rousseau was not a faith but 
an emotion, capable of impelling, not of control- 
ling or sustaining men. Here, as Quinet in his re- 
cent work has pointed out, lay the root of the 
whole failure. Institutions, antiquated and decay- 



Pitt 2 1 5 

ed, may fall or be pulled down ; but humanity can 
advance into a new order of things only when it ( 
is borne forward on the wings of a new faith. 
And not a step will be made toward the attain- 
ment of a new faith by guillotining all the tyrants 
and oligarchs in the world. 

First there was a revolutionary movement in 
which the generous hopes and glorious promises 
which fascinated the youth of Wordsworth, South- 
ey, and Coleridge were blended with the premon- 
itory symptoms of the crimes and horrors to come, 
and accompanied by an explosion of chimeras, of 
rhetoric, of theatrical egotism, and of political 
folly, the fearful significance of which is plain to 
the retrospective eye of history. Then ensued 
Anarchy and the Eeign of Terror, which has left 
so deep and almost ineffaceable a stain on the 
cause of Progress, and from the effects of which 
that cause has suffered ever since, and is suffering 
to this hour. After Anarchy and the Terror came 
a military despotism which, by its piratical tyran- 
ny over Europe, put the hearts of all nations on 
the side of the national despots, who presented 
themselves as the only saviors from the rule of a 
foreign conqueror and the insolent myrmidons of ^ 
his oppression. Not only George III. and his 
Tory ministers, not only the half-Liberal monarchy 
of Prussia, but an Emperor of Austria, a Bourbon 



216 Three English Statesmen. 

King of Spain, became in the eyes of their tram- 
pled subjects liberators and friends of freedom. 
We are all glad that the Treaty of Vienna has 
been torn up ; but it ought to be borne in mind 
that it was in its origin, partly indeed a counter- 
revolutionary arrangement of the despots, but 
partly also a military arrangement, framed, not 
without necessity, to secure Europe against the 
cruel rapacity of France. The conquests of Na- 
poleon may have hastened the fall of feudalism, 
which in any case was inevitable ; but what was 
this compared with the mischief done by the de- 
struction of human life and of the fruits of human 
labor by the reaction created in favor of the old 
dynasties and institutions, by the evil passions 
everywhere aroused, above all by the permanent 
impulse given to the great curse of this genera- 
tion, the system of standing armies, and generally 
to the war spirit among nations ? The Code Na- 
poleon is vaunted as though it had sprung from 
the conqueror's brain, and been propagated by his 
arms ; but in fact it is merely the embodiment 
of the more enlightened and humane theories of 
jurisprudence which had been gaining ground 
throughout the eighteenth century, and had been 
to a great extent carried into effect by paternal 
despots, such as Leopold of Tuscany and Freder- 
ic the Great. And against the Code Napoleon 



Pitt, . 21 J 

we have to set the revival for the evil purposes of 
despotism of the state religion and the state priest- 
hood of France. 

To the Napoleonic despotism France, after a 
brief interlude of uncongenial freedom, has re- 
turned ; and this despotism is the keystone of the 
system of standing armies and government by 
force in Europe. Like Slavery, it is inherently 
propagandist; and it has infected the govern- 
ing class, even in this country, with a tendency 
to violence "and martial law. Better than the 
Bourbon despotism it may be, inasmuch as it 
openly embraces social equality and religious 
toleration, though it covertly undermines the 
first by the creation of a military aristocracy, and 
the second by its alliance with an obscurantist 
and Jesuitical priesthood. But if any one is in- 
clined to take Bonapartism at its own estimate, 
and to concur in calling a Bonaparte a Messiah, 
let him first consider the progress which had been 
made under the forms of the old institutions by 
Frederic the Great, Joseph the Second, and Will- 
iam Pitt. 

I do not wish to excuse, much less to justify, 
the despots of the Coalition. By their conspira- 
cy, by their invasion of France, by the outrageous 
threats which, through the proclamation of the 

Duke of Brunswick, they uttered against the 

K 



218 Three English Statesmen. 

independence of the French people, they commit- 
ted at once a great blunder and a great crime, 
and they reaped the bitter fruits of their offense. 
Wisdom, by the lips of old Kaunitz, had warned 
them of their proper course — to draw a cordon 
round the eruption and let the volcano consume 
its own entrails, as it assuredly would have done. 
They chose, instead of this, to tap the crater, and 
bring the lava-torrent down upon themselves. 
Their attack at once threw the Revolution into 
the hands of the violent party, and was the proxi- 
mate cause of the massacres of September and of 
the Reign of Terror. It made the Revolution 
military. The creed of the Voltairians was a 
creed of peace. Voltaire is never so good as 
when he is ridiculing the cruel folly which crimps 
a number of ignorant and innocent peasants, 
dresses them up in uniform, teaches them to 
march and wheel, and sends them off to kill and 
be killed by another army of peasants, ignorant 
and innocent like themselves, as a sacrifice to 
what is called the honor of kings. The teachings 
of Rousseau were, if possible, more pacific than 
those of Voltaire. Robespierre by conviction 
and interest was averse to war. And if the Gi- 
rondins in their egotism were ready, against their 
principles, to invoke a war for the objects of their 
ambition, the army of the monarchy having been 



Pitt 219 

utterly broken up, France was without an army ? 
till the advance of the Duke of Brunswick gave^ 
her an army of despair. But we must weigh the 
misdeeds even of the Coalition of Pilnitz in a just 
balance. The trade of these men was to be kings : 
the world, time out of mind, had sanctioned that 
trade : in many of the nations over which they 
ruled, and which were too backward for free in- 
stitutions, the trade was necessary still. But the 
French Eevolution proclaimed itself universal, 
and threatened all the thrones and altars of the 
world with change. It has been much praised 
for having done so, as though it had soared be- 
yond the narrow bounds of national self-interest 
which limited the vision of revolutionists in other 
nations. Such proclamations cost no self-sacri- 
fice ; they may spring from vanity and folly as 
well as from breadth of sympathy and catholicity 
of view ; their value must be estimated by the 
acts which follow ; and the acts of the proclaimers 
of universal brotherhood, in this instance, toward 
foreign nations, as well as toward each other, were 
unhappily the acts of brothers Cain. Those who 
were the first to welcome them with open arms 
were the first to feel their rapacity and insolence. 
But, at all events, the announcement of universal 
revolution could not fail to arouse the instinct of 
self-preservation in established governments, and 



220 Three English Statesmen, 

such a combination as the Coalition of Pilnitz 
was morally certain to result. Neither the 
English Revolution of the seventeenth century 
nor the American Revolution proclaimed itself 
universal; both of them entered at once into 
friendly relations with other governments of 
whatever form ; yet these revolutions did more 
in the end than the French Revolution for the 
liberties of mankind. 

We may be thankful, at all events, that the 
fortunes of humanity, in this its critical transition 
from feudalism to the era of equality and justice, 
are now partly placed in other hands ; and that 
from the extinct volcano of Jacobinism we may 
turn to a United Italy and a United Germany, 
unsullied by terrorism and full of hope. 

There can be no sadder proof of the bad effects 
of the French Revolution on the general interest 
of Progress than the conversion of Pitt to the 
side of the Reaction. He was as far as possible 
from wishing to attack the revolution. Probably 
he sympathized with it while it kept terms with 
reason and humanity. He had entered into the 
most friendly relations with the American Re- 
public, notwithstanding the influence of the Amer- 
ican Revolution on Ireland. In 1792, when vio- 
lence had already begun in France, he reduced 
his army, struck off two thousand seamen, and 



Pitt 221 

held out the highest hopes of farther relief from 
taxes within the next fifteen years. " For al- 
though," said he, in his budget-speech, " we must 
not count with certainty on the continuance of 
our present prosperity during such an interval, 
yet unquestionably there never was a time in the 
history of this country when, from the situation 
of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fif- 
teen years of peace than we may at the present 
moment." He looked forward to the abolition of 
customs' duties, which would have been at the 
same time the inauguration of free trade. All 
his plans and hopes were bound up with peace. 
He stood aloof from the Congress of Pilnitz. 
Had his action been free, he would probably have 
stood aloof to the end. 

The fears and passions of the court, the aristoc- 
racy, and the clergy, had, however, been aroused ; 
the progress of the revolution daily increased the 
excitement among these classes, and it was raised 
to the highest pitch by the declamations of Burke. 
As an economical and Indian reformer, Burke, in 
the earlier part of his career, had been one of the 
best organs of the movement, into the reaction 
against which he now flung himself headlong. If 
the greatness of offenses were to be measured, not 
by the badness of the intention, but by the bad- 
ness of the effect, few greater offenses would ever 



222 Three English Statesmen, 

have been committed than the publication of the 
" Reflections on the French Eevolution." It was 
the special duty of a political philosopher at that 
moment to allay passion, to bring the nation un- 
der the dominion of its reason, and to enable it to 
meet calmly and wisely the tremendous crisis 
through which Europe was evidently about to 
pass. Mr. Buckle thinks that Burke, who up to 
this time had been the first of statesmen, now 
suddenly went mad. But the truth is, that two 
of his best treatises, the " Letter to Sir Hercules 
Langrishe" and the " Thoughts on Scarcity," were 
written after the "Reflections on the French Rev- 
olution." In a certain sense he had always been 
mad ; his reason had always been liable to be 
overpowered by his imagination ; he had always 
in his moments of passion been incapable of self- 
control ; he had always had in him that which is 
commonly the root of madness, for he was a great 
egotist, and his egotism is always breaking out 
under the thin disguise of an affected self-depreci- 
ation. He had lost the ear of the House of Com- 
mons as much by his extravagance and rant as 
by his prolixity ; he had come to be regarded not 
only as a dinner-bell but as a fool ; and if we are 
scandalized at the exclusion of this man of genius 
from the cabinet, people in 1789 would have been 
more scandalized at his admission. " Folly per- 



Pitt. 223 

sonified," lie was called by one who had just been 
hearing his speech on the Regency Bill ; and the 
same witness says that he finished his wild speech 
in a manner next to madness. When the house 
would not listen to his ravings, he called them a 
pack of hounds. He described the lord chancel- 
lor as a man with black brows and a large wig, 
and said he was fit to do an act worse than high- 
way robbery. He spoke in offensive language 
even of the afilicted king. He called upon the 
clerk to read the Great Charter because a bill for 
the reduction of offices trenched on some vested 
interests. He took a dagger out of his pocket, 
and hurled it on the floor of the House, as a sym- 
bol of the atrocity of the French Revolution; 
upon which Sheridan remarked that he had 
brought the knife, but he had forgotten to bring 
the fork. He deserves the national gratitude for 
having summoned Hastings before the bar of jus- 
tice ; but the violence of his sallies in the course 
of the trial gave a great advantage to the accused. 
Though he was by principle a free trader, his par- 
ty passions had led him to oppose Pitt's measure 
for free trade with Ireland. He was now dis- 
credited, somewhat neglected by his friends, rest- 
less from mortified self-love, and ready for an out- 
break. Mad in any other sense he was not. 
No doubt in the " Reflections" he is sincere. 



224 Three English Statesmen. 

He was a worshiper of constitutional monarchy. 
It was his Fetish. He loved and adored it with 
the passionate loyalty which, as an Irishman in 
his own country, he would have felt toward the 
chief of his clan. Politics were his religion, to 
which, in his mind, any other religion was sub- 
servient, as he showed when, for political pur- 
poses, he supported the imposition of the Thirty- 
Nine Articles on the reluctant consciences of 
clergymen who had petitioned for relief. His 
philosophy afforded no firm and lofty ground of 
immutable faith in things unseen, from which he 
could form a rational estimate of political sys- 
tems, as things merely subservient to the higher 
life of man, venerable only for their utility, not to 
be altered without good reason, but when there 
was good reason, to be altered or abolished with- 
out superstitious scruple, and destined like all 
other parts of the outward vesture of humanity 
to pass away before the end. He did not know 
that, while many things that are of man are good, 
nothing is sacred but that which is of God. He 
was not so much an advocate as a priest of the 
constitution and its mythical founders ; he preach- 
ed sermons on it as fervent as those of Bossuet, 
and defended its absurdities by arguments which 
his piety suggested as strange as ever a Koman 
friar used in defense of his superstitions. Ac- 



Pitt 225 

cording to him it was ordered by a sort of divine 
wisdom that Cornwall should have as many mem- 
bers as Scotland, because the representation was 
thus prevented from being too closely connected 
with local interests. When the French Revolu- 
tion got beyond his consecrated type, it forfeited 
his sympathies, and with a nature so passionate 
as his, to forfeit sympathy was to incur hatred. 

I do not complain of his strictures on the folly 
and incompetence of the French Revolutionists. 
Here he could scarcely go beyond the truth. 
But I complain of his blindness, which charity, 
making the utmost allowance for the frenzy of 
rhetoric, can scarcely pronounce altogether invol- 
untary, to the evils of the French monarchy and 
church — I should rather say his raving panegyrics 
on things shocking to sense and virtue. " Ideas 
furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagina- 
tion" — " decent drapery of life" — "vice losing half 
its evil by losing all its grossness" — is it possible 
that he can sincerely have applied snch terms to 
the system of Louis XV., of the Eegent Orleans, 
of Cardinal Dubois ? Knowing, as he must have 
done, the character of the French aristocracy, can 
he in perfect goo$ faith have uttered in relation 
to them the blasphemous extravagance that there 
were two sources of all good in Europe, the spir- 
it of religion and the spirit of a gentleman? 

K2 



226 Three English Statesmen. 

Knowing, as he must have done, the condition of 
the French people, and the responsibility of the 
court for their misery, can he have failed to be 
aware of the sophism of which he was guilty in 
presenting that court under the image of the 
dauphiness as a star rising full of beauty and 
beneficence over the horizon of Versailles ? That 
this beautiful and beneficent monarchy was bank- 
rupt is a fact of which its devotee just shows him- 
self conscious, and the remedy suggested by the 
great public moralist is in effect robbery of the 
public creditor, which he thinks preferable to any 
appropriation of the property of the State Church. 
He defends the ecclesiastical sinecurism so enor- 
mous in France, on the ground that ecclesiastics 
make as good a use of property as laymen; an argu- 
ment which would prove that there can scarcely 
be too much corruption in the Church. His po- 
litical philosophy does not enable him, in his anti- 
revolutionary transports, to distinguish between 
the character of feudalism in its own day and its 
character when its day was past, or between the 
situation and the difficulties of the English nation 
in 1688 and those of the French people in 1789. 
In this vituperation of the National Assembly 
and the movement party in France, if he is some- 
times telling, he sometimes sinks to the level of a 
scold. His declamations against declaimers, his 



Pitt 227 

sophistical attacks upon sophisters, the contempt 
which he the economical reformer affects for econ- 
omists and calculators, would move a smile if 
we did not know how terrible their effect had 
been. He talks unctuously of religion, and lash- 
es himself and his readers into fury against 
French Atheism. Soon we find him at the feet 
of Catherine of Russia, a Voltairian in creed, and 
more than a Voltairian in practice, conjuring her, 
with fulsome flattery, to " lend the aid of her un- 
scrupulous arms in crushing the objects of his 
political aversion. Burke broke with his old 
party : he won the affection, almost the worship, 
of a new party, the fierce applause of a new audi- 
ence. He received a pension, and the promise of 
a peerage, from the court and the Tory Govern- 
ment. His eminence entitled him to a pension if 
any body was to be pensioned, and to a peerage 
if he, a peer of intellect, cared to be a lord. But 
that he should accept these rewards of his change 
of party was another proof of the truth of his 
own statement — that the age of chivalry was 
gone. 

Of course the clergy were deeply moved, and 
the drum ecclesiastic beat to arms. Horsley, the 
leading political bishop of the day, and a sort of 
ecclesiastical henchman of Pitt, is known as the 
author of the maxim "that the people have no- 



228 Three English Statesmen. 

thing to do with the laws but to obey thein." 
This prelate preached a sermon, published in his 
works, in which, correcting the imperfect views of 
the Founder of Christianity, he lays it down that 
a conscientious submission to the sovereign power 
is, no less than brotherly love, a distinctive badge 
of Christ's disciples — in other words, that the dis- 
tinctive badge of Christians is to love one another 
and be Tories. He thanks God that in the 
Church of England both these marks of genuine 
Christianity have ever been conspicuous, He 
then proceeds to say " that in the exercise of 
brotherly love, it is perhaps the amiable infirmity 
of Englishmen to be too easy in admitting the 
claim of a spiritual kindred — that the times com- 
pel him to remark that brotherly love embraces 
only brethren — that the term of holy brother- 
hood is profaned by an indiscriminate application 
— that if persons living under the British consti- 
tution have dared to exult in the proceedings of 
the French revolutionists, with them it is meet 
that we abjure all brotherhood : a claim on our 
charity these miserable men may have, they have 
none on our brotherly affection." If this was 
preached by a man of sense and learning in a re- 
sponsible position and before an intelligent audi- 
ence, we may imagine what was preached from the 
rural pulpit before the squire. It is to be borne 



Pitt. 229 

in mind, however, that if the State bishops and 
clergy, who supposed their wealth and their priv- 
ileges to be in danger, inveighed against the impi- 
ety of revolution, so did Robert Hall, fascinated as 
he had been at first by its political promises and 
hopes. The French atheists shocked all decency, 
as well as all religion. 

It must be added that Fox behaved unwisely. 
His generous heart was on the side of liberty : but 
there was too much in him of the Palais Royal, 
too much of the former member of the gambling 
club at Almack's, where people played for des- 
perate stakes, with masks to conceal their emo- 
tions and a wild masquerading dress to typify 
their delirious excitement. The political arena 
was to him still a gambling-table : and his strong 
point was not self-control. He ought, in the inter- 
est of his cause, to have repressed the ardor of his 
sympathies, to have blamed the excesses while he 
showed the benefits of the Revolution, to have 
pointed out how inevitable it was in France, how 
different was the case of the English from that of 
the French monarchy, how small was the danger in 
England of French contagion ; and then to have 
insisted that for whatever danger there might be, 
the right antidote was not war or violent repres- 
sion, but timely measures of reform. He would 
thus have strengthened the hands of Pitt, whom 



230 Three English Statesmen, 

he must have known to be moderate, in resisting 
the war tendencies of his party and of the court. 
Instead of this he held the language of a Jacobin, 
and at once inflamed the panic and wounded the 
national pride by talking of the Revolution as the 
most glorious event since Saratoga and Yorktown. 
His hot-headed followers, of course, went beyond 
their chief. But he was the leader of the Oppo- 
sition, and the function of a leader of Opposition 
is, at all costs and hazards, to assail and to em- 
barrass the government. "While this system of 
party government lasts it must be so. But we 
will hope that party government is not to be the 
end of all things; and that in the course of our 
political changes we shall find a way of establish- 
ing a government to which we may all feel loyal, 
and which we may all desire to support as the 
government, not of a party, but of the nation. 

For one of his speeches Fox has been rather 
unreasonably blamed. Speaking of the refusal of 
the French guards to act against the people, he 
said that the example of a neighboring nation had 
proved the fear of standing armies to be unfound- 
ed, since it was now shown that by becoming a 
soldier, a man did not cease to be a citizen. This, 
at the time, brought on a storm of denunciation, 
which still rebellows in the histories. " All the 
objections," says Mr. Massey, "that have been 



Pitt 231 

urged by theoretical writers and popular orators 
against permament military establishments, sink 
into insignificance when compared with the ap- 
palling magnitude of the danger attendant on an 
armed force which is to arbitrate in disputes or 
conflicts between the people and their rulers." Mr. 
Massey fails to see that, as it is, the armed force in 
the hands of the rulers all over Europe arbitrates 
in the disputes and conflicts between the rulers 
and the people. Standing armies are the bane of 
the world, and to make them a perfect curse it is 
only necessary to extinguish in the soldier the last 
spark of the citizen and the man. Soldiers, while 
they are soldiers, must submit to a rigid discipline, 
and move at the word of command : it is the con- 
dition of their calling and the dictate of their hon- 
or. But I claim for the soldier, whether officer or 
private, the rights of labor and of man. I claim 
for him, in the first place, the right to dispose, like 
other men, of his own industry ; to make the best 
terms he can for himself, like other men, in the 
labor market, and to give his employer warning — 
such warning, of course, as the nature of the calling 
may reasonably require — if fair terms are not allow- 
ed. In this way our army might be smaller, but it 
would be better than it is now. In the second 
place, I claim for the soldier the right to retire, 
and to deliver up his arms, though by no means 



232 Three English Statesmen. 

to use them against his employer, when he finds 
that his military duties are likely to come into 
conflict with his duties as a citizen. There will 
"be no fear of his exercising this right, unless the 
heart of the nation is really against the govern- 
ment, and when the heart of the nation is really 
against the government, the government ought 
not, if politics are a matter of reason and justice, 
to have the means of putting down the nation by 
brute force. The habit of treating the soldier for 
a long term of years as the bondman of the gov- 
ernment and the blind instrument of its will, is a 
relic of barbarism, against which advancing civili- 
zation will in the end protest. 

Pressed by his own party, not supported in 
his resistance by the Opposition, Pitt, though the 
spirit of Adam Smith struggled hard and long 
in him, began to slide toward war. He first 
showed his tendency by a royal proclamation 
against seditious writings, and by measures of 
half hostility toward France — an Alien Bill 
pointed against French emissaries, an act prohib- 
iting the circulation of assignats, and another 
prohibiting the exportation of corn and flour to 
France. At last he himself caught, or affected to 
catch, the panic, and held wild language about 
his head being in danger. The French Republic- 
ans meanwhile, by their aggressive violence and 



Pitt. 233 

their frantic language, were giving every possible 
handle to their enemies. To treat their wild 
propagandising their decrees of universal revolu- 
tion, as the ravings of madmen, whose paroxysm 
would soon be over, and who would too surely 
avenge their outrages on themselves, was the 
course pointed out by wisdom : but it was not an 
easy course for Pitt to take. The execution of 
the king — a proceeding as disgusting in its theat- 
rical levity, as it was shocking in its cruelty — 
gave a death-blow to the hope of peace. The 
French ambassador was ordered to leave the 
kingdom, and there was war. My belief is that 
Pitt felt he was doing wrong : but though a pat- 
riot and a man of honor, he had not a god in his 
breast. He could not resign power and break 
with all his friends. Seasoning like a financier, 
and seeing the depreciation of the French assig- 
nats, he thought that it would be a short war. 
When he found himself deceived in this, he made 
earnest, even humiliating efforts, to negotiate, to 
buy, a peace. 

And what was the cause of this war which sus- 
pended all politicaland social progress for thirty 
years, or rather threw it back to a point which it 
had reached early in the eighteenth century, and 
under the fiscal burdens of which, and its perhaps 
still heavier burdens of other kinds, we still 



234 Three English Statesmen. 

groan? Established morality permits statesmen 
to resort to arms without having first tried ar- 
bitration, and this in cases where their personal 
prejudices or rivalries may be the real obstacles 
to a pacific settlement. But they are bound to 
assign a definite ground of war, without which 
there can be no assignable terms of peace. In 
the case before us no definite ground of war has 
been assigned down to the present day. From 
the various authorities on the subject, you would 
gather that England took up arms to put down 
the Jacobins, to save herself from the contagion 
of revolutionary principles, to punish regicide, to 
check the territorial aggrandizement of France, to 
establish the existence of the Supreme Being, and 
to close the navigation of the Scheldt. 

To have gone to war for the purpose of closing 
the Scheldt would have been the act of a greater 
maniac than the Jacobins. It would have been 
like fighting about a right of way in the middle 
of an earthquake. But the truth was that we 
were concerned in the matter only as guarantors, 
and the Dutch did not call upon us to perform 
our guarantee. • 

As Burke wrote against a Regicide peace, he 
must have looked upon the execution of the king 
as the ground of the war. The murder of the 
French king was an offense against Heaven, and 



Pitt 235 

Heaven would certainly have visited it, and did 
visit it, though not by the thunderbolt, by a sure 
moral retribution, as well as the still more das- 
tardly and atrocious murder of the queen, upon 
the savages by whom it was committed. But it 
was no offense against us. It was in fact commit- 
ted partly in imitation of our execution of Charles 
I. And if the murder of the king was the cause 
of the war, what was to be its object ? - To bring 
the king to life again ? Or to punish his murder- 
ers? Or to punish the whole French nation? 
If there was to be no Regicide peace, how was a 
war with Regicides to be brought to an end ? 

The vindication of public right is another 
ground assigned for the war. The conduct of 
the French Eepublicans to the countries which 
they overran was infamous. But they had vio- 
lated no public right which we were concerned 
to defend. The allied kings had attacked them ; 
they had beaten the allied kings, taken the offen- 
sive, and commenced a career of conquest in their 
turn. This was the fortune of war. And these 
allies of ours in the cause of public right, what 
sort of champions of that cause were they ? Aus- 
tria, Prussia, and Russia had just consummated 
the partition of Poland, the most flagrant viola- 
tion of public right in history, and one against 
which, let them roll as many stones to the mouth 



236 Three English Statesmen, 

of that sepulchre as they will, nature and justice 
will protest till right is done. Not only so, but 
when we had become their confederates, Austria 
and Prussia took possession by robbers' law of 
Conde and Valenciennes, in spite of the protest 
of the Bourbons, for whom, as legitimate sover- 
eigns of France, the allies professed to fight ; and 
when Austria afterward, in concert with Bona- 
parte, committed an act of brigandage by the 
seizure of Venice, this produced in us no moral 
repugnance to her alliance. The conduct of En- 
gland was, as I am prepared to maintain, more 
disinterested on the whole, as well as marked by 
greater constancy and fortitude than that of any 
other nation engaged on either side. Her liber- 
ties, imperfect as they were, breathed into her 
government a spirit of honor which was not 
found elsewhere, and checked infamies which in 
the secret counsels of despotism were conceived 
without shame and perpetrated without rebuke. 
But even England from the beginning made it a 
war of interest as well as of alleged principle; 
and our first act was the appropriation of the 
Island of Tobago. 

French propagandism, and especially the pro- 
pagandist decree of the 19th November, 1792, is 
another alleged justification of the war. But 
this was merely the counterblast to the propagan- 



Pitt. 237 

disni of the Duke of Brunswick. If it was law- 
ful for the allies to declare themselves the protect- 
ors of monarchy in France, it was equally lawful 
for the French to declare themselves the protect- 
ors of Republicanism in other countries. We 
ourselves avowed, though with faltering accents, 
that it was part of our object to change the gov- 
ernment of France. The decree of the 19th No- 
vember, so far as we were concerned, was empty 
fanfaronade ; no execution could be had of it in 
this country provided our government behaved 
decently to our people; it might have been treat- 
ed by England as the insult of a lunatic, which 
touches no man's honor. 

Was it against French Atheism that we went 
to war? This probably was the leading motive 
of the clergy. It can not have been the motive 
of Pitt. He at least must have had sense enough 
to know that mankind could not be convinced of 
the existence of a beneficient Creator by filling 
creation with blood and havoc. And who were 
the representatives of religion % An emperor of 
Austria, who shortened his life by self-indulgence; 
a king of Prussia, of whom it was said, in allusion 
to his emulation of Frederic the Great, " that he 
had nothing of Solomon but his concubines ;" the 
Semiramis of the North ; prince-bishops of the 
Rhine, whose petty courts were noted as the 



238 Three English Statesmen. 

sacred scenes of every pleasure. Among our- 
selves, the Duke of York with, his Nancy Par- 
sons; Lord Chancellor Thurlow, who died with 
the name of God on his lips, but not in prayer; 
not to mention the minister himself, who some- 
times saw two speakers instead of one. 

The great Tory authority, Sir Archibald Ali- 
son, is very frank and explicit. He says that 
what the government had in view was not the 
conquest of the Republicans, but a danger nearer 
home : that they dreaded domestic revolution if 
pacific intercourse were any longer carried on 
with France. He cites a remark of the Empress 
Catherine to the effect that war is sometimes the 
only way of giving a useful direction to the pas- 
sions, and says that in this remark is to be found 
the true explanation and the best vindication of 
the French war. " The passions," he proceeds, 
" were excited, democratic ambition was awaken- 
ed ; the desire of power, under the name of reform, 
was rapidly gaining ground among the middle 
ranks, and the institutions of the country were 
threatened with an overthrow as violent as that 
which had recently taken place in the French Mon- 
archy. In these circumstances the only mode of 
checking the evil was by engaging in a foreign 
contest, by drawing off the ardent spirits into act- 
ive service, and in lieu of the modern desire for 



Pitt. 239 

innovation, rousing the ancient gallantry of the 
British people." Sir Archibald is certainly wrong 
as to the fact, The institutions of the country were 
not threatened with overthrow. The people were 
loyal ; they had shown the utmost enthusiasm on 
the recovery of the king's health. Burke himself 
said that not one man in a hundred was a Revo- 
lutionist. Fox's revolutionary sentiments met 
with no response, but with general reprobation, 
and caused even his friends to shrink from his 
side. Of the so-called Jacobin Societies, the So- 
ciety for Constitutional Information numbered 
only a few hundred members, who, though they 
held extreme opinions, were headed by men of 
character, and were quite incapable of treason or 
violence. The Corresponding Society was of a 
more sinister character; but its numbers were 
computed only at 6000, and it was swallowed up 
in the loyal masses of the people. The mob at 
Birmingham rose for Church and king, and sack- 
ed the house of Priestley because he was an Athe- 
ist, or, what was the same thing, a man of science. 
A Tory mob at Manchester treated Mr. Walker, a 
respectable Reformer of the place, in a similar 
manner. We had a Parliament of rotten bor- 
oughs, but still a Parliament ; a law framed more 
in the interest of the rich than of the poor, but 
still a law; a free press ; trial by jury and habeas 



240 Three English Statesmen, 

corpus, no letters de cachet, no Bastille. The 
State Church was unjustly privileged, but not 
persecuting ; and the Dissenters, if they did not 
love the Test and Corporation Acts, had no desire 
to worship the Goddess of Reason in the form of 
a naked prostitute on the altar of St. Paul's. 
The religious middle classes were soon repelled by 
the impieties of the Revolution, social enthusiasts 
like Coleridge and Southey by its atrocities, all 
men of sense by its monkeyism and its madness. 
Foreign emissaries can do nothing except where 
there is widespread disaffection among the people. 
The army, navy, yeomanry, and militia were per- 
fectly sound. Volunteers in large numbers an- 
swered the call of the government. At the threat 
of a French invasion the nation would have risen 
as it had risen against the Armada. In Ireland 
alone there was real and just hatred of the gov- 
ernment : but the long pressure of an iron tyran- 
ny had crushed Ireland into mute despair : and 
in this case, as in all cases, Irish disaffection was 
rendered dangerous only by the war which 
brought it the aid of foreign arms. The govern- 
ment had but to rule well, tread steadily in the 
path of moderate reform, and keep the defenses 
in good order. England would then have passed 
unscathed through the crisis, and the wisdom 
of her rulers would have ensured the gratitude 



Pitt, 241 

of the nation. But supposing that the reverse 
had been the case : supposing that the Tory pan- 
ic had been as well founded as it was ground- 
less ; — does the morality of Sir Archibald Alison 
and his party sanction the maxim of the virtuous 
Catherine, that governments are at liberty to di- 
vert troublesome aspirations into the channel of a 
foreign war ? Is there any thing more dangerous 
than this in the ravings of the Jacobins? Is 
there any thing more immoral in Machiavelli? 
The principle, no doubt, is intended for the ex- 
clusive use of such governments as Tories desire to 
uphold. But its application can not be arrested 
there. If the Tories had a right to divert revo- 
lutionary sentiment into the channel of war, the 
Jacobins had a right to divert reactionary senti- 
ment into the same channel: and Napoleon had 
the same right to get rid in the same manner of 
the sentiments which, as he declared, threatened 
the stability of his throne. 

The same remark applies to the excuse found- 
ed on the danger of political contagion. Are all 
governments to be alike licensed to make war 
with their neighbors for the purpose of political 
quarantine % Is the privilege to be extended to 
republics disquieted by the neighborhood of mon- 
archies and aristocracies, as well as to monarchies 
and aristocracies disquieted by the neighborhood 

L 



242 Three English Statesmen. 

of republics ? Or is it taken for granted that no 
free commonwealth can be so ill-rooted in the af- 
fection of its citizens, or so wicked as to make use 
of such a power % 

It is sad to say it, but when Pitt had once left 
the path of right, he fell headlong into evil. To 
gratify the ignoble fears and passions of his party, 
he commenced a series of attacks on English lib- 
erty of speaking and writing which Mr. Massey, 
a strong anti-revolutionist, characterizes as unpar- 
alleled since the time of Charles I. The country 
was filled with spies. A band of the most infam- 
ous informers was called into activity by the gov- 
ernment. Men were prosecuted for loose or 
drunken words, of which no man of sense would 
have taken notice, and for speculative opinions 
with which no government had a right to inter- 
fere. An attorney, named Frost, for saying in a 
coffee-house, where he could not have intended to 
conspire, and out of which he was, in fact, kicked 
by the company, that he was for equality and no 
king, was tried before Lord Kenyon, a high Tory 
judge, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment, 
to stand in the pillory, to find security for good 
behavior, and to be struck off the roll. The courts 
of quarter session, with their benches of Tory 
squires, were employed to try political cases by 
the government, to which their character as tri- 



Pitt, 243 

bunals must have been too well known. Associa- 
tions were formed under government patronage, 
for the detection and prosecution of sedition, and 
thus the impartiality of the jury was tainted at 
its source. There was a Tory reign of terror, to 
which a slight increase of the panic among the up- 
per classes would probably have lent a redder hue. 
Among other measures of repression the Ha- 
beas Corpus Act was suspended ; and the liber- 
ties of all men were thus placed at the mercy of 
the party in power. The Habeas Corpus Act is 
an Act of Parliament which Parliament may sus- 
pend. But the security of all English freemen 
from arbitrary arrest, as well as from any punish- 
ment without a trial by their peers, rests not on 
the Habeas Corpus Act, but on the great clause 
of the Great Charter, of which the Habeas Cor- 
pus Act is merely a supplement and guarantee. 
And the Great Charter is not an Act of Parlia- 
ment : it is a fundamental covenant between the 
government and all the people of these realms, 
a covenant which was before Parliament, which 
is above Parliament, and with which if Parlia- 
ment tampers, it may continue to reign by force, 
but it will no longer reign by right. The tyran- 
ny of the crown is past : it is the tyranny of the 
House of Commons against which we have now 
to guard. A House of Commons, not the prerog- 



244 Three English Statesmen. 

ative of the crown, was Pitt's instrument in his 
aggressions upon public liberty. " I called a Par- 
liament in Ireland," was the plea of Strafford, 
when he was accused of arbitrary government. 
" Parliaments without parliamentary liberties ," 
replied Pyra, " are but a fair and plausible way 
to servitude." A class Parliament is an oligarchy 
with a broad basis, more powerful for iniquity 
than any crown. 

In the cases of Home Tooke and his associates, 
the government well knew that there was no real 
evidence of treason. The charge of constructive 
treason was brought in instead of that of sedition, 
to make an impression on the nation and possess 
the public mind with the idea that there were 
terrible conspiracies, on foot. But to bring men 
to trial for their lives for such a purpose was a 
profanation of the 'courts of justice. The con- 
structive treason was made out thus : " The pris- 
oners had issued a prospectus for a convention. 
To issue a prospectus for a convention was to 
enter into a conspiracy to compel the king to 
govern otherwise than by the laws. A conspira- 
cy to compel the king to govern otherwise than 
by the laws was a conspiracy to depose him from 
the royal state, title, power, and government. 
Such an attempt must lead to resistance. Eesist- 
ance must lead to the deposition of the king, and 



Pitt. 245 

his deposition must endanger his life." Such was 
the substance of the capital indictment which it 
took the attorney-general nine hours to state. 
Supposing that policy could ever find a place in 
the proceedings of public justice, no sound policy 
could lead the government to incur an ignominious 
defeat. Sir Archibald Alison says the trials did 
good, because the acquittal of the prisoners 
showed the public that liberty was not on the 
decline, and the people, satisfied with this great 
victory over their supposed oppressors, relapsed 
into their ancient loyalty. A profound way of 
attaching the people to the government — to ex- 
hibit it to them as a tyrannical aggressor defeat- 
ed in an attempt to wrest law to the purposes of 
judicial murder ! 

It was in one of these State trials, where the 
accused, Major Cartwright, was the leader of a 
Parliamentary Reform Association, that the Pitt 
of former days, the Pitt who had once been a 
member of the same association and the foremost 
champion of its principles, was put into the wit- 
ness-box by the defense to bear witness against 
Pitt the renegade from Reform, the persecutor of 
Reformers in these evil times. Pitt might plead 
that circumstances were altered, and that when 
circumstances are altered, honorable men may 
change. Honorable men may change, and that 



246 Three English Statesmen. 

they should have full liberty of change is essen- 
tial to the public interest and to the integrity of 
public life. But no great nature ever passes a 
sponge over its former self: no great nature ever 
persecutes old friends. 

It was in one of these trials, too, that Eldon, 
then Sir John Scott and attorney-general, opened 
his attempt to procure the capital conviction of 
a man who he knew had done nothing w T orthy of 
death with a pathetic exordium on his own dis- 
interestedness and virtue. " He should have 
nothing to leave his children but his good name." 
And then he wept. The solicitor-general wept 
with his weeping chief. " What is the solicitor 
weeping for?" said one bystander to another. 
" He is weeping to think how very little the at- 
torney will have to leave his children." 

The juries at quarter sessions of course gave 
the verdicts desired by their proprietors on the 
bench. The London juries on the whole behaved 
well, and deserve our gratitude for their guardian- 
ship of public liberty in its hour of trial. They 
had not then been so entirely relieved of appre- 
hension for their own liberties as to make them 
regardless of the liberties of others. The judges 
behaved not so well. The tenure of the judges 
is independent. But after all they belong to a 
political party, and they belong to a social class ; 



Pitt 247 

and these are influences which, even on the 
judgment-seat, only the highest and strongest na- 
tures can entirely put aside. How to appoint 
judges who shall be strictly impartial in political 
cases, is, I fear, a problem still to be solved. 
But the judge who does in political cases show 
himself above every thing but justice is one of 
the greatest and noblest benefactors of his kind ; 
he presents law in its highest majesty to the rever- 
ence of the people ; and extinguishes in the hearts 
of men the sources of violence and revolution. 

In Scotland the Tory reign of terror was worse 
than in England. In Scotland there was scarcely 
the mockery of a representation of the people. 
The entire electoral body was not more than four 
thousand. Edinburgh and Glasgow had each a 
constituency of thirty-three electors. The county 
of Bute had one resident elector, who constituted 
the meeting, called over the freeholders, answered 
to his own name, moved and seconded his own 
nomination, put the question to the meeting, and 
unanimously elected himself. Every county and 
borough was in the hands of some proprietor. 
The whole country was one nest of jobbery and 
corruption, managed in the interest of the Tories, 
or I suppose we must say of religion and the Su- 
preme Being, by that eminent servant of Heaven, 
Mr. Dundas. The juries partook of the general 



248 Three English Statesmen. 

slavishness, the judges were fiercer Tories than 
the judges in England, and much less honest. 
Thomas Muir, a young advocate of high talents 
and attainments, was an active champion of par- 
liamentary reform, as any man in Scotland who 
had not the spirit of a serf would have been, and 
had been a delegate to the Edinburgh convention 
of Associated Friends of the People. An indict- 
ment for sedition was preferred against him by 
the government. "Every incident of the trial," 
says Sir Erskine May, the author of the " Consti- 
tutional History of England," "marked the un- 
fairness and the cruel spirit of his judges. In 
deciding on the relevancy of the indictment, they 
dilated upon the enormity of the offenses charged, 
which in their judgment amounted almost to 
high treason, the excellence of our constitution, 
and the terrors of the French Revolution. It 
was plain that any attempt to amend our institu- 
tions was in their eyes a crime. All the jury- 
men, selected by the sheriff and picked by the 
presiding judge, were members of an association 
at Goldsmiths' Hall who had erased Muir's name 
from their books as an enemy to the constitution. 
He objected that such men had already pre- 
judged his cause ; but he was told that he might 
as well object to his judges, who had sworn to 
maintain the constitution. The witnesses for the 



Pitt. 249 

crown failed to prove any seditions speeches, 
while they all bore testimony to the earnestness 
with which Muir had counseled order and obedi- 
ence to the law. Throughout the trial he was 
browbeaten and threatened by the judges. A con- 
temptible witness against him was caressed by 
the public prosecutor, and complimented by the 
court ; while a witness for the defense was hastily 
committed for concealing the truth, and Muir, 
when he offered to speak on his witness's behalf, 
was silenced and told that he had no right to in- 
terfere in the business. In the spirit of a bygone 
age of judicature the lord advocate denounced 
Muir as a demon of sedition and mischief. He 
even urged it as a proof of guilt that a letter had 
been found among his papers addressed to Mr. 
Fyshe Palmer, who was about to be tried for sedi- 
tion." Let us hope that the age of judicature, 
when a dominant party in possession of party 
courts of justice, or of those still more convenient 
instruments, courts of martial law, could murder 
the objects of its political hatred under the form 
of a trial, is as completely by-gone as Sir Erskine 
May imagines. Scroggs and Jeffreys are in their 
graves of infamy ; but their spirit is not quite 
dead. Muir defended himself gallantly, and drew 
from the audience applause, which one of the 

judges noticed as a proof of the seditious feelings 

L 2 



250 Three English Statesmen. 

of the people. He asserted that lie was brought 
to trial for promoting parliamentary reform. 
" The Lord Justice-Clerk Braxfield," remarks. Sir 
Erskine May, " confirmed this assertion by charg- 
ing the jury that to preach the necessity of re- 
form at a time of excitement was seditious." The 
judge harangued the jury against parliamentary 
reform. "The landed interest," he said, "alone 
had a right to be represented : as for the rabble 
who had nothing but personal property, what 
hold had the nation on them V Another judge 
said, " If punishment adequate to the crime of se- 
dition were to be sought for, it could not be 
found in our law, now that torture was happily 
abolished." Torture is not abolished, if the theo- 
ries now maintained by servile lawyers and pre- 
rogative politicians on the subject of martial law 
be true : if these theories be true, English free- 
men are still liable to torture. Muir was sen- 
tenced to transportation for fourteen years. " Of 
the three Koman punishments, crucifixion, expo- 
sure to wild beasts, and deportation," said one 
of the judges, "we have chosen the mildest." 
Chosen the mildest he had not, but a people not 
so barbarous as its rulers had forced him to take 
it. In another trial, a judge said, in summing up 
to the jury, " Gentlemen, the right of universal 
suffrage the subjects of this country never enjoy- 



Pitt. 251 

ed ; and were they to enjoy it, they would not 
long enjoy either liberty or a free constitution. 
You will therefore consider whether telling the 
people that they have a just right to what would 
unquestionably be tantamount to a total subver- 
sion of the constitution, is such a writing as any 
person is entitled to compose, to print, and to 
publish." Under such law, delivered from the 
bench of justice, a man was condemned to trans- 
portation for seven years. If, as Pym said, parlia- 
ments without parliamentary liberties are but a 
fair and plausible way to servitude, jury trial 
without impartial judges and honest juries is but 
a fair and plausible way to murder. 

Was Pitt answerable for all this? He was. 
With full knowledge of the facts he defended 
these outrages and their perpetrators in Parlia- 
ment. The infamy can not be wiped away from 
his once pure and patriotic name. Lord Stan- 
hope pleads that these and still more violent 
measures were demanded by the temper of the 
time. Does not the very fact, that the temper of 
the time was what Lord Stanhope states it to have 
been, prove that there was no danger of revolu- 
tion, and therefore not even that wretched justifi- 
cation for these outrages on liberty and law? 
And if the demand of a party was a warrant for 
violence in the case of the Tories, was it also a 



252 Three English Statesmen. 

warrant for violence in the case of the Jacobins ? 
It seems that Pitt even sank so far below his 
nobler self as to entertain the thought of taking 
advantage of the free language of his rival, Fox, 
and committing him to the Tower. 

The worst reign of Terror, however — a Eeign 
of Terror in no figurative sense — was in Ireland. 
Unhappy Ireland, and still more unhappy En- 
gland if Ireland is always to be our weakness and 
our shame, the standing confutation alike of our 
boasted statesmanship and of our boasted love 
of justice! In 1795, the Duke of- Portland and 
the Whig section of the cabinet, I fear against 
the wishes of Pitt, had sent over Lord Fitzwilliam 
as lord-lieutenant, with a policy of relief and con- 
ciliation. But Fitzwilliam had been too open in 
proclaiming his mission ; he had been too hasty 
in setting his heel on the agents of tyranny and 
corruption ; most fatal error of all, he had dis- 
missed one of the great robber house of Beres- 
ford. The whole nest of jobbers were immediate- 
ly alarmed ; and as the means of arresting justice 
they naturally had recourse to religion. They 
appealed against Catholic relief to the conscience 
of the king. We are frail beings, but conscience 
is always obeyed when she bids us deny a right 
to others. Fitzwilliam fell ; not, it is to be fear- 
ed, to the displeasure of Pitt, and was succeeded 



Pitt. 253 

by Lord Camden. Catholic relief was thrown 
out by the Irish Parliament, the government now 
declaring against it. Not contented with this, 
the Protestants began to organize themselves for 
the repression of the Catholics; the Catholics 
organized on their side ; and the hatred of the 
rival races and creeds burst forth. 

I have myself sought and found in the study 
of Irish history the explanation of the paradox, 
that a people with so many gifts, so amiable 
naturally, so submissive to rulers, and everywhere 
but in their own country industrious, are in their 
own country by-words of idleness, lawlessness, 
disaffection, and agrarian crime. But I will here 
follow Mr. Massey, not only one of the most mat- 
ter-of-fact of writers, but a most unquestionable 
enemy to revolution, Mr. Massey writes thus : 
" Lord Carhampton, the general commanding the 
forces in the disturbed districts, let loose his 
troops upon the wretched peasantry. It was 
enough for a magistrate, a squireen, or even a 
farmer to point out any person as suspected, to 
have his habitation burned down, his family , turn- 
ed adrift, and himself either shot or transported, 
without trial, without warrant, without inquiry. 
An Act of Indemnity was passed by the Irish 
Parliament, in the session of 1796, to protect 
these enormities ; and the Insurrection Act gave 



254 Three English Statesmen. 

theni for the future the sanction of law. The 
suspension of the habeas corpus completed this 
barbarous code, which, in effect, outlawed the 
whole people of Ireland." The government 
armed a great body of Protestant yeomanry, 
who were allowed to wear the Orange ribbon, 
the badge of ascendancy. "The cruelties," says 
Mr. Massey, " perpetrated by these men, both 
before the rebellion, and while it was raging, and 
after it was suppressed, differed only in degree 
from the worst enormities of the French revolu- 
tionists. Under the authority to search for con- 
cealed arms, any person whom any ruffian, call- 
ing himself a Protestant and a loyalist, and either 
with or without a military uniform, chose to sus- 
pect or to pretend to suspect, was liable to be 
seized, tortured, and put to death. Hundreds of 
unoffending people, and people who were guilty 
of no other offense than professing the creed of 
their fathers, and of letting fall a word of discon- 
tent, were flogged till they were insensible, or 
made to stand upon one foot on a pointed stake. 
These were the most ordinary punishments. 
Sometimes the wretched victim was half hanged, 
or the scalp was torn from the head by a pitched 
cap. Catholics and reputed malcontents of the 
better class were subjected to still worse treat- 
ment. Militia and yeomanry, as well as the regu- 



Pitt 255 

lar troops, were billeted on them at free quarters; 
and this billet appears to have been invariably 
construed as an unlimited license for robbery, 
devastation, ravishment, and, in case of resistance, 
murder.' 7 1 

Sir Kalph Abercromby, on assuming the com- 
mand of the army in Ireland, branded these 
ruffians in general orders as formidable to every 
body but the enemy. To him it did not appear 
essential to the honor of the profession that a 
soldier should be licensed to play the butcher. 
But he was at once hustled out of his command. 
The Catholics, if they had not been goaded to 
despair, would not have risen. Their priests had 
no sympathy with the Atheists of the French 
Eepublic. But the conduct of the Protestants 
and of the government drove them into the arms 
of France and of the revolutionary conspirators 
of their own country, who were mostly not Cath- 
olics, but Protestants, if they had any religion at 
all. When the Catholic peasantry did rise, they 
rose with the ruthless fury of tortured and em- 
bruted slaves, and perpetrated nameless atrocities 
in their turn. Then the saturnalia of martial 
law were proclaimed; and under cover of that 
proclamation, the vengeance of the dominant race 
was poured out, as we have just seen the ven- 
geance of a dominant race poured out, upon the 



* 



256 Three English Statesmen. 

victims of its hate. Of that phrase martial law, 
absurd and self-contradictory as it is, each part 
has a meaning^ The term martial suspends the 
,Tight~of citizen's to legal trial ; the term law sus- 
pends the claim of an enemy to quarter and the 
other rights of civilized war. The whole com- 
pound is the fiend's charter ; and the public man 
who connives at its introduction, who fails in his 
day and in his place to resist it at whatever cost 
or hazard to himself, is a traitor to civilization 
and humanity, and though official morality may 
applaud him at the time, his name will stand 
in history accursed and infamous forever. The 
first notable case under martial law in Ireland 
was that of Sir Edward Crosbie, a gentleman re- 
siding near Carlow, where a rising had taken 
place. I will give the case in the words of Mr. 
Massey. " It unfortunately happened," says that 
writer, " that the miserable rabble, before enter- 
ing the town, had paraded in the grounds of Sir 
Edward Crosbie, who resided at a distance of a 
mile and a half from Carlow. There was not a 
title of proof that this gentleman was in any way 
connected with the rioters, or that he had invited 
them to assemble on his lawn at midnight, pre- 
paratory to their lawless proceedings. He had 
not accompanied them, nor did it appear that he 
held any communication with them. But Sir 



Pitt. 257 

Edward was a friend to Parliamentary Keforni, 
and hostile to the oppression of the tenantry by 
their landlords. To "be friendly to the poor and 
to reform was presumptive evidence of disaffec- 
tion ; and presumptive evidence of disaffection 
was sufficient proof of complicity in the rebellion. 
The day after the attempt on Carlow several per- 
sons were seized, tried by court-martial, and 
hanged for this offense. Among others Sir Ed- 
ward Crosbie was dragged before a set of igno- 
rant, blood-thirsty ruffians, who styled themselves 
a court-martial. There was not a particle of evi- 
dence which could have had the least weight 
with a fairly constituted court, though Catholic 
prisoners had been, by torture and promises of 
pardon, converted into witnesses against the ac- 
cused. Numerous loyalists came forward to 
state what every body in the neighborhood knew, 
that Sir Edward was a good subject of his majes- 
ty, as well as one of the few humane and accom- 
plished gentlemen that Ireland possessed. But 
these witnesses were excluded from the place 
where the proceedings were held by the bayonets 
of the soldiery. A gentleman of rank and for- 
tune, who thought that Parliament should be re- 
formed, and that squireens should not be permit- 
ted to grind and insult the peasantry, was a dan- 
gerous member of society, and must be made an 



258 Three English Statesmen. 

example of to deter others. Accordingly, Sir Ed- 
ward Crosbie was doomed to death by a court- 
martial, the president of which was an illiterate 
fellow who could not spell. The sentence was 
immediately put in execution at the gallows ; and 
the remains of the murdered gentleman were 
abused in a manner shocking to humanity." 
The passages of history which derive their char- 
acter from the lower and viler passions are apt to 
repeat themselves with great fidelity. 

Lord Cornwallis, who had at length been sent 
over by Pitt, in the place of the wretched Camden, 
to stop these orgies of blood, states in one of his 
letters that under martial law " numberless mur- 
ders are hourly committed without any process 
or examination whatever." " The yeomanry," he 
says, " are in the style of the loyalists in America, 
only much more numerous and powerful, and a 
thousand times more ferocious. These men have 
served their country, but they now take the lead 
in rapine and murder. The Irish militia, with few 
officers, and those chiefly of the worst kind, follow 
closely on the heels of the yeomanry in murder 
and every kind of atrocity ; and the Fencibles 
take a share, although much behindhand with the 
others. The language of the principle persons of 
the country all tends to encourage this system of 
blood ; and the conversation, even at my table, 



Pitt. 259 

where you will suppose I do all I can to prevent 
it, always turns on hanging, shooting, burning, etc. 
And if a priest has been put to death, the greatest 
joy is expressed by the whole company." He 
asserts from his own knowledge of military affairs 
that of the numbers of the enemy reputed to be 
killed, a very small proportion only are really kill- 
ed in battle — and adds that " he is afraid that any 
man in a brown coat, who is found within several 
miles of the field of action, is butchered without 
discrimination." He describes the principal per- 
sons of the country and the members of both 
Houses of Parliament as "averse to all acts of 
clemency, and desiring to pursue measures that 
would terminate in the extirpation of the inhabit- 
ants and the destruction of the country." Lord 
Cornwallis was no friend of rebels : he had com- 
manded against rebels in America : he was a Tory : 
he showed no weakness in quenching the embers 
of the insurrection in Ireland. But a burst of loyal 
execration arose against his detestable clemency. 
Dr. Duiguenan, the organ of the Orange party, 
wrote to Lord Castlereagh that the conduct of 
the lord-lieutenant had rendered him an object 
not only of disgust, but of abhorrence to every loy- 
al man. " You write," says Cornwallis to General 
Eoss, " as if you believed that there was any foun- 
dation for all the lies and nonsensical clamor about 



260 Three English Statesmen. 

rny lenity. On my arrival in this country, I put 
a stop to the burning of houses and murder of the 
inhabitants by the yeomen, or any other person 
who delighted in that amusement ; to the flogging 
for the purpose of extorting confession, and to the 
free quarters, which comprehended universal rape 
and robbery throughout the country." A party 
of the Mount Kennedy corps of yeomanry (again 
I tell my story in the words of Mr. Massey) were, 
on an autumn night in the year 1798, patrolling 
the village of Delbary, in the county of Wicklow. 
Two or three of the party, led by Whollaghan, 
one of their number, entered the cottage of a la- 
boring man named Dogherty, and asked whether 
there were any bloody rebels there ? The only in- 
mates of the cabin were Dogherty's wife and a 
sick lad, her son, who was eating his supper. 
Whollaghan asked if the boy was Dogherty's son, 
and being told he was — "Then you dog," said 
Whollaghan, " you are to die here." " I hope not," 
answered the poor lad ; and he prayed, if there 
was any charge against him, to be taken before 
Mr. Latouche, a magistrate in the neighborhood, of 
known humanity and justice. The fellow replied 
that he cared nothing for Latouche, and raised his 
gun. The mother entreated him, for the love of 
Grod, to take her life instead of her child's. Whol- 
laghan, with a volley of abuse, pulled the trigger 



Pitt. 261 

twice, but the piece missed fire. A comrade then 
handed him another gun ; and the mother rushed 
at the muzzle to shield her son. In the struggle 
the piece went off, and the ball broke young 
Dogherty's arm. When the boy fell, the assassins 
left the cabin ; but Whollaghan returned, and 
seeing the lad supported by his mother, cried out, 
" Is not the dog dead yet V " Oh, yes, sir," said 
the poor woman, " he is dead enough." " For 
fear he is not," said Whollaghan, " let him take 
this." And with a deliberate aim he fired a 
fourth time, and Dogherty dropped dead out of 
his mother's arms. Whollaghan was tried for the 
murder, not by a civil tribunal as he should 
have been, but by court-martial. The facts were, 
not disputed ; but the defense was that the poor 
boy had been a rebel, and that the prisoner was 
a humane and loyal subject. That the Dogh- 
ertys were rebels is probable enough; as in- 
deed, says Mr. Massey, whom I am still follow- 
ing, it was hardly possible that a Catholic peas- 
ant could have been any thing else. But no 
legal evidence of the fact was tendered; and 
the hearsay, which was admitted, was about as 
credible as the oath of the Orangemen who came 
to give Whollaghan a character for humanity. 
The real defense was that the prisoner and his 
companions had been sent out with general orders 



262 Three English Statesmen. - 

to shoot any body they pleased. " The court," 
remarks Mr. Massey, " seemed to have been of 
opinion that such orders were neither unusual or 
unreasonable; and it is difficult to extract from 
their finding that they thought the prisoner had 
been guilty even of an error in judgment." 
They found that " the prisoner did shoot and kill 
Thomas Dogherty, a rebel ; but acquitted him of 
any malicious or willful intention of murder." 

Their sentiments seem, in fact, to have been 
pretty much the same as those which prevail in 
high official regions now. The trial took place 
at Dublin. The president of the court-martial 
was one of the leading members of that order 
who are the guardians of an honor and a moral- 
ity above those of the common herd : he was the 
Earl of Enniskillen. 

In Tipperary, Mr. Thomas Judkin Fitzgerald, 
a man of conspicuous loyalty, was made high-sher- 
iff, and acted as a sort of provost-marshal in that 
district. His plan, says Mr. Massey, was to seize 
persons whom he chose to suspect, often without 
the slightest ground, if not from sheer malice, 
and by dint of "the lash and threats of instant 
death, to extort confessions of guilt and accusa- 
tions of other persons. He recommended himself 
especially to the approbation of all loyal men by 
attacking a somewhat higher class of persons 



Pitt 263 

than most of his compeers ventured to attack. 
Mr. Wright, a teacher of languages at Clonmel, 
and a man of good family, heard that he was sus- 
pected. He hastened to deliver himself up, in 
the hope that he might thus save his character 
and life. But Fitzgerald was not to be disap- 
pointed of his victim. He received Mr. "Wright 
with a torrent of abuse, and ordered him to fall 
on his knees to receive his sentence. " You are a 
rebel," said he, " and a principal in this rebellion. 
You are to receive five hundred lashes, and then 
to be shot." The poor man begged for time, and 
was so rash as to ask for a trial. This aroused 
Fitzgerald to fury ; he railed at his prisoner for 
daring to open his mouth after he was condemn- 
ed. Wright was hurried to the flogging ladders, 
which were erected in the main street ; and ex- 
pecting immediate death, had placed his hat be- 
fore his face while he muttered a prayer. Fitz- 
gerald with his own hand tore away the hat, 
trampled on it, dragged his fainting victim by the 
hair, kicked him, and finally slashed him with a 
sword, drawing blood. Wright was then fasten- 
ed to the ladder. Fifty lashes had been inflicted, 
when a Major Eiall came up and asked what 
Wright had done. The sheriff answered by fling- 
ing Eiall a note taken from the person of Wright, 
as a justification of the punishment to which he 



264 Three English Statesmen. 

was subjected. The note was in French — a lan- 
guage of which Fitzgerald was wholly ignorant — 
and contained two lines excusing the writer for 
having failed in a visiting engagement. Riall as- 
sured Fitzgerald that the note was perfectly 
harmless ; nevertheless, the lash continued to de- 
scend until the quivering entrails were visible 
through the flayed flesh. The hangman was then 
ordered to apply his thongs to a part of the body 
which had not yet been torn, while the sheriff 
himself went to the general in command of the 
district for an order to put his prisoner to death. 
The order, however, was not given, and Wright 
was released. 

To add to the bright roll of English honor, 
Mr. Thomas Judkin Fitzgerald received a pen- 
sion, and, at the Union, was made a baronet of 
the United Kingdom. 

These men were not fiends ; they were a domi- 
nant class, the planter-class of Ireland, maddened 
with cruel panic and administering martial law. 
It is good that these things should be recalled to 
mind when we see men of letters and artists, who 
have been brought up in the air of English liber- 
ty and within the sound of Christian church bells, 
proposing to blow Fenians from guns, and to re-en- 
act on Irish insurgents the atrocities which mark- 
ed the putting down of the Indian mutineers. 



PitL 265 

Ireland had what one of our prelates calls a 
Missionary Church ; that is an establishment pro- 
fusely endowed out of the penury and the misery 
of the Irish people ; and the bishops and clergy 
of which were intended, I suppose, to be placed 
by their wealth and privileges above the passions 
of any class, and enabled boldly to preach justice 
and mercy. What were they doing? Were 
they preaching justice and mercy, or were they 
doing what the prelates and clergy of the planter 
church of Jamaica do now — drawing up certifi- 
cates of Christian character for men whose hands 
were red with innocent blood? It is a point 
which I have never been able clearly to ascertain. 

There is nothing in this revolting history more 
revolting than the cant about loyalty. Loyalty 
is not due from the conquered and the oppressed 
to the conqueror and oppressor. Nothing is due 
but submission, which the conqueror and oppress- 
or must enforce as best he can. 

The Indemnity Act passed by the Irish Parlia- 
ment unfortunately proved insufficient to cover 
all these acts of the supporters of order, and es- 
pecially the use of torture. Certain bloody-mind- 
ed persecutors, pseudo-philanthropists, and Hi- 
berno-philists were proceeding to appeal to the 
courts of law against indiscriminate butchery, tor- 
ture, and arson. So the Parliament — of the tem- 

M 



266 Three English Statesmen, 

per and language of whose members, Lords and 
Commons alike, we have heard Lord Cornwallis's 
description — passed a more comprehensive Act, 
which effectually screened every murderer, tor- 
turer, and incendiary from the law. Safe under 
this Act, Fitzgerald, when arraigned before a jury, 
vaunted his exploits in the face of justice. He 
named several persons whom he had flogged un- 
der circumstances more aggravated than those be- 
fore the court. He mentioned one man who had 
cut his throat to escape the horrors and ignominy 
of torture. He admitted or boasted that in his 
search for rebels he had flogged many persons 
who had proved to be perfectly innocent. Lord 
Avonmore, who tried the case, did not dissemble 
his grief and indignation at having to administer 
such a law as that which had recently been enact- 
ed. After dwelling on the flagrancy of the out- 
rage, for which he said no damages would have 
been too great, he ended by saying that the 
words of the Act placed an insuperable bar be- 
tween injury and redress, and set all equity and 
justice at defiance. And with that he dashed - 
the Act upon the cushion, and threw himself 
back on his seat. 

Lord Moria brought the state of things in Ire- 
land before the British Legislature; of course 
without effect. The government supported their 



Pitt. 267 

subordinates. If it is the duty of governments 
to support their subordinates, the people must 
support themselves. Statesmen are learning to 
make an easy reputation for chivalry by support- 
ing their subordinates at the expense of human- 
ity Justice, and the honor of the nation. Public 
morality requires that a subordinate should be 
supported in difficulty always, in error sometimes, 
in crime never. 

Lord Stanhope charitably ascribes these hor- 
rors, in the refusal of all inquiry into which he 
apparently concurs, to a helpless crisis in human 
affairs, such as is described by the Cardinal de 
Eetz, caused by accident and mischance, not by 
the faults or errors of mankind. It was no help- 
less crisis, but the natural consequence of Protest- 
ant ascendancy in Ireland, sustained by the oli- 
garchical government and hierarchy of this coun- 
try. They were the authors before God of the 
Eebellion, though the people died for it by earth- 
ly law. And how far, I ask again, is the benefit 
of these excuses to extend % If ever the hand of 
fate was seen in history, it was in the history of 
the French Kevolution. If ever a crisis could be 
called helpless, it was that of 1793. Is this to 
absolve the Jacobins? No; there have been 
misfortunes in Irish annals— misfortunes which 
were not faults — misfortunes which the rulers of 



268 Three English Statesmen. 

Ireland in past times may fairly plead in their 
own excuse at the bar of history. The partial 
nature of the Anglo-Norman Conquest of Ireland, 
which led to the formation of an English pale in- 
stead of a national aristocracy mingling in course 
of time with the native race, was the original 
spring from which this bitterness flowed. But 
Protestant ascendancy was a fault, not a misfor- 
tune. And the obstinate maintenance in the in- 
terest of a class of an alien church and an alien 
land law in Ireland are faults, not misfortunes, 
now. The guilt of the consequences in the eye 
of Heaven rests on the government, though still, 
by earthly law, the people pay the penalty. 

The appearance of Hoche and his French ar- 
mament of liberation in Bantry Bay was a warn- 
ing which could not be neglected. Irish disaffec- 
tion, if it is not formidable in itself, will always 
be formidable when it is backed by foreign aid. 
If Hoche had landed, he would, for the time at 
least, have been master of Ireland. The Orange 
yeomanry and militia, though they could murder, 
burn, and torture, could not stand before an enemy, 
as they showed when they were led against the 
small French force afterward landed by Humbert. 
And with steam instead of sails Hoche would 
have landed. It had become manifest that the 
Orange government of Ireland was not only crim- 



Pitt. 269 

inal but dangerous. Pitt now resolved to carry 
the Union, and the Union was carried. It was 
carried through an Irish Parliament in which the 
Irish people were not represented, and which had 
no sort of right or title to dispose of the independ- 
ence of the nation. And through that Parlia- 
ment it was carried by bribery and corruption of 
every kind, including the prostitution of honors 
and offices as well as pensions, so foul and infamous 
that men of honor such as Lord Oornwallis, who 
were employed in the operation, shrank with 
loathing from their task. One million two hun- 
dred and sixty thousand pounds were distribu- 
ted among the proprietors of boroughs as compen- 
sation for the loss of their means of preying on 
the State, and the peerage was again recruited 
with houses which derive from this noble origin 
their divine right of legislating for the nation. 
The acquiescence of the Catholics was procured 
by fraud ; the hope of emancipation was distinct- 
ly held out to them as the price of their concur- 
rence, and and was not fulfilled. The Union was 
a good and an indispensable measure. It was, 
as Pitt saw, the only chance of saving Ireland 
from Protestant ascendancy and provincial tyr- 
anny : and legally of course it is perfectly valid. 
To give it moral validity, it requires the free rati- 
fication of the Irish people. When the Union is 



270 Three English Statesmen, 

what Pitt declared it was to be, a union of equal 
laws, that ratification will be obtained. 

J itt is generally held to have been a bad war 
minister. That he was not a successful war minis- 
ter is certain : and in war, if in any thing, minis- 
ters may be judged by their success. His navy 
gained victories by dint of British seamanship 
and courage. His military operations ended al- 
most uniformly in disaster. His forces were never 
found on a decisive field. Like a bad chess-play- 
er he ran over the board taking pawns, while the 
adversary was checking his king. He carried 
his victorious arms from Tobago to St. Domingo, 
from St. Domingo to St. Lucia, and from St. Lu- 
cia to Guadaloupe. This was the traditional 
mode of making war on France ; and he did not see 
how different was the France on which he had 
now to make war. Meantime his allies were be- 
ing beaten in battles, which, if they had been 
won, would have given him as many sugar islands 
as he pleased; and which, being lost, swept 
away the sugar islands in the general ruin. When 
Bonaparte and the best army of France were in 
Egypt and off the board, Pitt took advantage of 
their absence, not to join his allies in dealing a de- 
cisive blow, but to make an isolated descent on the 
enemy's country, the weakest operation in propor- 
tion to the force employed which can be under- 



Pitt. 271 

taken, and one which in this case ended in igno- 
minious failure. He had not his father's eye for 
men. Chatham would have brought Nelson to the 
front before. When Nelson had won the Nile, 
Pitt only gave him the lowest rank in the peerage, 
and said, in defense of this parsimony in reward- 
ing merit, that Nelson would live as the winner 
of the greatest of naval victories, and that no one 
would ask whether he had been made a baron, 
a viscount, or an earl. This, when the 'highest 
rank in the peerage was being every day bestow- 
ed on political subserviency, and even on politi- 
cal corruption: when Sir James Lowther was 
made an earl direct for his influence at Appleby. 
Pitt is open to a worse censure than that of mere- 
ly failing to distinguish merit. When he allowed 
himself to be made minister by an unconstitution- 
al use of the king's personal influence, he had sold 
himself to the fiend, and the fiend did not fail to 
exact the bond. Twice Pitt had the criminal 
weakness to gratify the king's personal wishes by 
entrusting the safety of English armies and the 
honor of England to the incompetent hands of 
the young Duke of York. This absurd prince- 
ling actually objected to acting under the com- 
mand of Clarifait, the most competent and emi- 
nent of the allied generals : and to gratify his con- 
ceit, the command-in-chief was assumed by the 



272 Three English Statesmen, 

* 
emperor the arch-incompetency of all. But after 

all, could promotion by merit be expected at the 
hands of governments whose essence was privi- 
lege \ It was against promotion by merit that 
they were righting. To accept promotion by mer- 
it would have been to accept the revolution. 

In the sixth year of the war, the nation was 
brought to the brink of destruction by a mutiny 
in the fleet, caused entirely by the vices of the 
administration. The pay of the sailors and their 
pensions had not been increased since the time of 
Charles II., in spite of the immense rise of prices 
since that period, which must have been felt more 
than ever in time of war. This, while millions 
were being paid to borough-mongers and sinecur- 
ists, and when Tomline was not satisfied unless 
he had a rich bishopric and a rich deanery too. 
Light weight of provisions was served, a sailor's 
pound being fourteen ounces instead of sixteen ; 
and even for this short weight the sailors were 
dependent on pursers taken from a low class, 
who cheated them without limit. The distribu- 
tion of prize-money was most unfair ; the disci- 
pline most vexatious ; the officers, who were ap- 
pointed entirely by interest, were incompetent 
and tyrannical; and seamen who had fought the 
battles of the country, seamen scarred with hon- 
orable wounds, were sworn at and abused like 



Pitt. 273 

dogs by insolent and worthless boys. At last 
the sailors rose and respectfully demanded redress. 
The government, conscious of its guilt, was com- 
pelled to accede to their demands, and even to 
dismiss a number of officers from the service. 
But the spirit of mutiny once roused, naturally 
broke forth again in a more turbulent and dan- 
gerous form. It was suppressed at last, and jus- 
tice of course was done on the principal muti- 
neers, who were hanged or flogged through the 
fleet. It must be owned, however, that even in 
the case of the worst offenders, justice was tem- 
pered with mercy, for no lord of the admiralty 
was either flogged or hanged. Since that time, 
and owing originally to the mutiny, the navy 
has been in a sounder state. Neither that nor 
any service will be in a perfectly sound state till 
dismissal is the highest punishment. And now 
— Democracy is such an ungrateful thing — can 
any one point out to us an instance in history, 
from Athens down to the American Republic, in 
which a Democracy treated its defenders as the 
\ British seaman was treated before the mutiny at 
Spithead % Democracy does not build Blenheims 
and create vast estates for the general or the ad- 
miral ; but it is just, and it can not help being 
just, to the soldier and the sailor. 

What Pitt's war finance was, taxpayers need 

M2 



274 Three English Statesmen. 

not to be told. He did make an effort to keep 
borrowing within bounds, but it soon broke 
down, and he plunged headlong into an abyss of 
debt. In this he was backed by a Parliament of 
the rich and idle trained to public extravagance 
by prodigality at home. His own recklessness 
in private expenditure is too well known. It com- 
pelled him to accept somewhat ignominious aid. 
This system of laying burdens on posterity re- 
moves, as I have said before, the last check on 
war. Nor is it capable of moral defense. The 
theory on which Pitt and his supporters acted — 
that they had a right to mortgage the estate which 
they bequeathed to posterity — assumed that the 
earth belonged to one generation of men. The 
earth does not belong to one generation of men, 
but to God, who has given it to each generation 
in its turn. 

Of Pitt's war taxes the most notable were the 
income tax and the succession tax. The income 
tax is a tax which ought to be resorted to only 
in time of war or in some national emergency 
which excites the national spirit as much as war. 
It is only when the national spirit is so excited 
that there is a chance of true returns. In ordi- 
nary times the income tax is a tax on honesty, a 
premium on dishonesty, a corrupter of national 
and especially of commercial honor. Pitt pro- 



Pitt. 275 

posed a succession duty on real and personal 
property alike; but the landlord Parliament 
threw out the duty on the real property, and 
passed that on personal property alone. There 
are no Trades Unions in the House of Commons. 

Pitt had gone into the war reckoning on the 
failure of the French finances. While French 
finance was recruited by despair, he was driven 
to a suspension of cash payments. There is no 
great mystery, I apprehend, about the character 
and effects of this measure. It was, in fact, a 
forced loan, which was paid off, at the expense of 
great national suffering, by the return to cash pay- 
ments after the war. Meantime it caused a depre- 
ciation of the currency, which bore hard on fixed 
incomes, while it did not affect the land-owners, 
whose rents 'could be raised. 

All political progress was, of course, suspended 
in England, as it was over Europe generally, in 
these disastrous years. Pitt's speeches were full 
of clap-trap against democracy, as though equali- 
ty were responsible for the political calamities 
which privilege had brought on in France. He 
now openly renounced Parliamentary Reform, 
and began to declaim in the full Tory strain 
against following false luminaries and abandon- 
ing the pole-star of the British constitution. He 
and his party maintained that the rotten borough 



276 Three English Statesmen. 

Parliament, the stench of whose corruption rose 
to heaven, which was wasting the blood and sub- 
stance of the people in a class war, and brutal- 
izing them at the same time, had been found 
amply sufficient for securing their happiness, and 
that the system ought not to be idly and wanton- 
ly disturbed, from any love of experiment, or 
predilection for theory. It would be very wrong 
to do any thing wantonly or idly, or from mere 
love of experiment, or predilection for theory. 
But supposing that an absurd system of repre- 
sentation did work well, not only for those who 
monopolize power and patronage under it, and 
who of course find it practically excellent, but 
for the nation : still its absurdity would be an 
evil calling for amendment, because institutions 
ought to command the reverence of the people, 
which they can not do unless they are intelligi- 
ble and consistent with reason. And if theory 
is nothing, and if the people are already practi- 
cally represented, where is the great danger of 
bringing the theory into accordance with the 
practice ! Great allowance is to be made for the 
Tory Minister in this matter: but had he been 
one of the first of statesmen, he would have seen 
how sure an antidote against disaffection and 
foreign contagion was to be found in timely and 
moderate Reform. 



PitL 277 

It has been said that when Pitt had once gone 
into the war, he ought to have made it a crusade. 
Burke complained at the time that he did not : 
and the charge has been repeated with great am- 
plitude of rhetoric by Lord Macaulay. If Pitt did 
not actually proclaim a crusade, he used language 
about the salvation of Europe wild enough to satis- 
fy most fanatics, and the flagitious nonsense which 
he did not talk himself, he allowed his colleagues 
and subordinates to talk for him. So far as he re- 
strained himself or them, he is to be praised, as 
Lord Stanhope justly says, for not having given 
the war a character which would have made it 
internecine. But as to a crusade, who were to be 
the crusaders % Would the borough-mongers and 
the sinecurists have played the part of Tancred 
and Godfrey ? "Would Tomline and Dr. Cornwal- 
lis have gone forth, like the bishops of the middle 
ages, at the head of the army of the Cross ? Burke 
himself, the Peter the Hermit of this crusade, would 
he have left Beaconfield and his pension to share 
the doom of those whom he had sent forth to die? 
Save the Sepulchre ! Save Gatton and Old Sa- 
rum ! Save the Earldom of Lonsdale, save the 
Clerkship of the Pells, the Wardenship of the 
Cinque Ports, the Tellership of the Exchequer, the 
salaries of the Six Clerks, and the Deputy Chafe- 
wax ! Save the Deanery of St. Paul's and " the 



278 Three English Statesmen. 

only arrangement which can offer any accommo- 
dation in my favor !" Crusading is self-sacrifice. 
These men were carrying on a war in their own 
interest, with armies of peasants trepanned by 
drink and the recruiting sergeant, with seamen 
levied by the press-gang, and with the money of 
future generations. They had not self-sacrifice 
enough even to suppress for the moment their 
own petty jealousies and interested intrigues for 
office in the most desperate moments of the strug- 
gle. The ruling class, I apprehend, bore little of 
the burden. If their taxes rose, their rents and 
tithes rose also ; and they shared a vast mass of 
patronage besides. The great merchants who 
supported the war were in like manner growing 
rich, as great merchants in war often do, at the 
expense of their less opulent rivals. Burke had 
described them on a former occasion as snuffing 
with delight the cadaverous scent of lucre. The 
crusading spirit, if it was anywhere, was on the 
side of the French youths, who went forth shoeless 
and ragged, without pay, with nothing but bread 
and gunpowder, to save their country from the 
Coalition, and, as some of them thought, to over- 
throw tyranny of body and soul, and open a new 
reign of justice and happiness for mankind. When 
the French Revolution had turned to the lust of 
military aggrandizement embodied in Bonaparte, 



Pitt 279 

the crusading spirit passed to the other side, and 
then the leaders of England might appeal to it 
not in vain. 

Pitt did not know why he had gone to war, 
and therefore when he found himself abandoned 
by most of his allies, the rest requiring subsidies 
to drag them into the field, the cause of Europe, 
as it was called, thus renounced by Europe itself, 
every thing going ill, and no prospect of amend- 
ment, he did not know how or on what terms to 
makepeace. This is called his firmness. He vague- 
ly represented himself as fighting for security 
for the past and reparation for the future, and his 
words were parrotted by his party; but it was 
not stated what the reparation or the security 
was. He pretended at one time that there was 
no government in France with which a treaty 
could be made. There was always a government 
in France, even during the Reign of Terror, obey- 
ed by the nation and the national functionaries, 
and with which, therefore, a treaty might have 
been made. It signifies nothing, as every body 
would now admit, how polluted the origin or 
character of a foreign government may be, you 
must treat with it as a government. If its origin 
and character are polluted, or even questionable, 
you need not, and if you are jealous of the honor 
of your country and your own you will not, fling 



280 Three English Statesmen. 

England into its arms, or eagerly place her hand 
in the hand which has been held up to heaven in 
perjury and is stained with innocent blood. But 
you must treat all governments as governments ; 
it is the only way of fixing responsibility where 
circumstances not under your control have fixed 
power. 

Pitt, however, finding disasters thickening, did 
struggle to make peace. He underwent great hu- 
miliations to obtain it. His envoys waited, with 
a submissiveness and a patience which must call 
a blush to every English cheek, in the antecham- 
bers of the insolent and domineering Directory. 
He even offered to pay two of the Directors the 
heavy bribe which they demanded. England 
trying to bribe two sharpers to vouchsafe her a 
peace ! But the profligate lust of aggrandizement 
which had now taken the place of defensive 
objects in the councils of the French Government, 
the insufferable temper of its chiefs, the divisions 
in the Directory between the Jacobins and the 
party of Reaction, and at the same time the divis- 
ions in the English cabinet between Pitt, who was 
for peace, and Grenville, who was still for war, 
prolonged the bloodshed and the misery for eight 
years. At last, in 1801, peace, and an ignomini- 
ous peace, was inevitable. Pitt has been suspect- 
ed of having slipped out of office and put Adding- 



Pitt. 281 

ton in to eat the dirt, meaning himself to return 
to power when the dirt had been eaten. There 
seems to be no ground for the suspicion, though 
Pitt's conduct at this juncture is not easy to under- 
stand. The ostensible cause of Pitt's retirement 
was the king's refusal to allow him to redeem the 
pledge which he had given to the Catholics at the 
time of the Irish Union. Not only was his honor 
involved, but it was of vital importance to the 
nation, engaged in a desperate struggle, that the 
estrangement of the Irish, from whom a large pro- 
portion of our soldiers were drawn, should be 
brought to an end. But the king had a con- 
science. Pitt resigned, putting in his friend and 
creature, Addington, merely, as I am convinced, to 
keep his place for him till the Catholic difficulty 
could be solved. " Mr. Pitt," said Sir James Gra- 
ham, speaking of the Catholic Emancipation, " was 
prepared to do the right thing at the right mo- 
ment; but genuis gave way to madness, and two 
generations have deplored the loss of an oppor- 
tunity which never will return." Genius gave way 
to madness, but to madness practiced upon by 
genius of another kind. The chief performer was 
Lord Loughborough, of whom when he died His 
Majesty was pleased to say (having first assured 
himself that the melancholy news was true) " that 
a greater rogue was not left in his dominions." 



282 Three English Statesmen. 

Loughborough's coadjutor was Auckland, after- 
ward spurned as a knavish intriguer both by Pitt 
and by the king. Their instruments in tampering 
with the conscience of the half-insane king were 
Moore, Archbishop of Canterbury, the odor of 
whose nepotism has reached the nostrils even of 
our generation, and the Primate of Ireland, who 
was called in as a wolf to decide this question of 
conscience as to the claims of the sheep. There 
is scarcely a worse intrigue in history. 

And now came a strange turn of affairs. 
Scarcely was Pitt out and Addington in, when 
Pitt sent the king a promise never to moot the 
question of Catholic Emancipation again during 
his life. Not only so, but he undertook, in case 
any one else should moot the question, to find the 
means of setting it aside. The reason alleged for 
this strange sacrifice of a pledge and a principle, 
was that the agitation of the king's mind on the 
subject had brought on a recurrence of his illness. 
If this was true, we may remark, in the first place, 
that here is another warning to nations in search 
of a constitution ; and, in the second place, that if 
the state of the king's mind was ' such that he 
could not consider a State question of the most 
vital and pressing importance without bringing 
on derangement, he was physically unfit for the 
duties of his ofiice, and he ought to have given 



• Pitt. 283 

place to a Kegent. Lord Stanhope urges the 
claim of his Majesty's conscience to loyal forbear- 
ance, but perhaps he does not sufficiently consid- 
er, on the other hand, the claim of the nation to 
existence. The doctrine that one man ought to 
die for the people has been propounded, though 
not by auspicious lips ; but no one has yet pro- 
pounded the doctrine that the people ought to 
die for one man. Not only George III., but his 
highly conscientious son and successor, had scru- 
ples about Catholic Emancipation and the coro- 
nation oath : and George the Fourth's successor 
might have had the same. This is not constitu- 
tional government. What great measure of re- 
form would ever have been carried, if it had re- 
quired the free personal assent of the sovereign 
and the majority of the House of Lords ? George 
III. was against the abolition of the slave-trade. 
Were the horrors of the middle passage to go on • 
while he lived \ But the fact is, his conscience 
was not a God-made conscience, it was a bishop- 
made and chancellor-made conscience ; and it had 
not the firmness any more than the purity of the 
God-made. It would have given way under vig- 
orous pressure, as it always did. He had ordered 
his yacht for Hanover more than once; but he 
countermanded it when people were firm. 

One thing, at all events, ought to have been 



284 Three English Statesmen, 

done. The secret intriguers against justice and 
the safety of the nation ought to have been drag- 
ged into the light of day, and made personally 
responsible for the advice which they had given 
the king. But how could Pitt do this — he who 
had allowed himself to be made prime minister 
by the secret and equally infamous intrigue be- 
tween the king and Temple % The fiend always 
claims his bond. 

The situation, however, was now absurd. Pitt 
was out, though by his abandonment of the Cath- 
olic cause the sole ostensible ground of his retire- 
ment had been removed: Addington was in, 
equally without reason. Of course Pitt's friends 
wished at once to take out the warming-pan and 
put back the man. But to do this was now not 
easy. The warming-pan did not know that it 
was a warming-pan. It had been told by Pitt 
when he put it in that it was the man of the cri- 
sis. It took the flatterer at his word. It grew 
settled and self-satisfied in place. The king, who 
had revered the august Pitt, was attracted with 
magnetic force to the comfortable mediocrity of 
Addington. He addressed him in the most affec- 
tionate terms — " The king can not find words suf- 
ficiently expressive of his Majesty's cordial appro- 
bation of the whole arrangements which Ids own 
chancellor of the exchequer has wisely, and His 



Pitt. 285 

Majesty chooses to add most correctly, recom- 
mended." Pitt himself, though clearly conscious 
of the disarrangement, was, for a long time, for- 
bearing: he had enough to rest on: but his 
younger friends were more impatient. Canning 
lampooned Addington, who had a brother named 
Hiley, and a brother-in-law named Bragge : 

" When the faltering periods lag, 

When the House receives them dryly, 
Cheer, oh, cheer him, Brother Bragge, 
Cheer, oh, cheer him, Brother Hiley. " 

And again, when the Thames was being forti- 
fied with block-houses: 

"If blocks can from danger deliver, 
Two places are safe from the French, 
The one is the mouth of the river, 
The other the treasury bench." 

The same active and ingenious spirit proposed 
to present to Addington a round-robin, telling 
him how much every body wished him to resign ; 
and as there was a difficulty in getting the best 
signatures, Canning suggested that the round- 
robin should be sent in without signatures, and 
that Addington should be told that he could 
have the signatures if he liked. It was proposed 
that Addington, as being Speaker was his spe- 
cialty, should be made Speaker of the House of 
Lords; they would have made him Speaker of 



286 Three English Statesmen, 

Elysium if that place liad been vacant. For 
three years all the world was out of joint, and every 
body was in perplexity. Mr. Wilberforce wrote 
in his diary : " I am out of spirits, and doubtful 
about the path of duty in these political battles. 
I can not help regretting that Addington's tem- 
perance and conciliation should not be connected 
with more vigor." And then he puts up a pray- 
er to Heaven for guidance. Heaven, I suspect, 
left these politicans pretty much to themselves. 

At last necessity, which will have the man and 
not the warming-pan, came in the shape of the 
renewal of the war with a danger of invasion. 
A little subterranean work was done by the Lord 
Chancellor Eldon, and Addington found himself 
and his friends gently lifted out of place, and 
Pitt quietly installed in their room, Eldon remain- 
ing chancellor in the new administration. Lord 
Elclon's conduct in this matter, of which many 
hard things have been said, has been a good deal 
cleared by Lord Stanhope. Addington, it ap- 
pears, authorized the chancellor to open negotia- 
tions, and all that can be said is, that he was not 
kept informed of their progress, and was by no 
means gratified at their result. Eldon thought 
himself above the rules. He was the king's own 
chancellor, not a mere member of ephemeral 
administrations. Had not the king, when the 



4 
Pitt 287 

chancellor was appointed, buttoned up the great 
seal in the breast of his coat, and taking it out 
said — " I give it you from my heart V However, 
after the light thrown upon the transaction by 
Lord Stanhope, we are happy to acquiesce in His 
Majesty's intimation to "his excellent lord chan- 
cellor," that " the uprightness of Lord Eldon's 
mind, and his attachment to the king, have borne 
him with credit and honor, and (what the king 
knows will not be without its due weight) with 
the approbation of his sovereign, through an un- 
pleasant labyrinth." The last two words at all 
events are true. 

Pitt came in to conduct a war, and this time 
a necessary war ; for I am convinced that with 
the perfidy and rapine of Bonaparte no peace 
could-be made, that the struggle with him was a 
struggle for the independence of all nations 
against the armed and disciplined hordes of a 
conqueror as cruel and as barbarous as Attila. 
The outward mask of civilization Bonaparte wore, 
and he could use political and social ideas for the 
purposes of his ambition as dexterously as can- 
non ; but in character he was a Corsican and as 
savage as any bandit of his isle. If utter selfish- 
ness, if the reckless sacrifice of humanity to your 
own interest and passions be vileness, history has 
no viler name. I can look with pride upon the 



288 Three English Statesmen, 

fortitude and constancy which England displayed 
in the contest with the universal tyrant. The 
position in which it left her at its close was fair- 
ly won : though she must now be content to re- 
tire from this temporary supremacy, and fall back 
into her place as one of the community of nations. 
But Pitt was still destined to fail as a war minis- 
ter ; and Trafalgar was soon cancelled by Auster- 
litz. " How I leave my country !" Such, it seems, 
is the correct version of Pitt's last words. Those 
words are perhaps his truest epitaph. They ex- 
press the anguish of a patriot who had wrecked 
his country. 




APPENDIX. 




N 



APPENDIX. 



THE ANCIENT FREEHOLDERS OF 
ENGLAND. 

The number of the Buckinghamshire freeholders who 
brought up the petition in favor of Hampden, and to whom 
reference is made in the lecture on Pym, was variously 
estimated at the time ; by themselves it was placed as 
high as six thousand, by their enemies as low as two thou- 
sand. (See Mr. Forster's " Arrest of the Five Members," 
p. 353, note.) Rushworth (iv. p. 487) says: — "This day 
divers knights, gentlemen, and freeholders of the County 
of Bucks, to the number of about four thousand (as they 
were computed), came to London, riding every one with 
a printed copy of the Protestation lately taken in his hat." 
Clarendon says : — " As soon as the citizens and mariners 
were discharged, some Buckinghamshire men, who were 
said to be at the door with a petition, and had, indeed, 
waited upon the triumph with a train of several thousand 
men, were called in ; who delivered their petition in the 
name of the inhabitants of the County of Buckingham, 
and said it was brought to the town by about six thou- 
sand men." 

In " Whitelocke's Memorials" (vol. iv. p. 272) there is 



292 Appendix. 

an entry respecting the writer's election as a knight of the 
shire for Buckingham, which throws some light on the 
number of the freeholders. " At the election of the knights 
of the shire for Bucks, my friends marched into Bucks one 
thousand horse, and were in the field above three thousand, 
so that I was first and unanimously elected, and with me 
Colonel Ingoldsby, Sir Richard Piggott, Mr. Hambden 
(the son of the great man), and Mr. Granville." This was 
under Cromwell's Reform Act, embodied in the Instrument 
of Government, which gave votes for counties not only to 
freeholders, but to all persons holding property, by what- 
ever tenure, to the value of £200 ; so that probably many 
leaseholders and copyholders took part in the election. 
On the other hand, those who had fought for the king 
since the commencement of the troubles were disabled from 
voting ; and in the divided state of the other party, conse- 
quent on the quarrel between the Presbyterians and Inde- 
pendents, it is not likely that all the electors who remained 
qualified would come forward to vote for a man connected 
as Whitelocke was with the Protector. Not a few of the 
wives of the freeholders who rode up to London to support 
Hampden must have been widows. Whitelocke's words 
seem to imply that the other candidates had their special 
cavalcades of adherents as well as himself, though they 
may have been less numerous than his own. We may feel 
pretty sure, from the habits of life prevalent at that time, 
that the bulk of these electors were really Buckingham- 
shire men resident on the holdings which formed their 
electoral qualifications. 

Whitelocke gives this account of the Ironsides :— " Crom- 
well had a brave regiment of horse of his countrymen, 
most of them freeholders and freeholder's sons, and who up- 
on matter of conscience engaged in this quarrel. And thus, 



Appendix. 293 

being well armed within by the satisfaction of their own 
consciences, and without by good iron arms, they would 
as one man stand firmly and fight desperately." 

M. Guizot, in his " History of the English Revolution," 
notices the subdivision of land and the increase of the 
different classes of resident proprietors as characteristic 
of the period of Charles L, ascribing them, in part, to the 
breaking up of the great Church estates, which had been 
granted to courtiers, by whose prodigality they were dis- 
persed, and to the sale of crown lands enforced by the 
fiscal necessities of the crown. 

There seems to be no doubt that in the seventeeth cen- 
tury, and even at a later period, England contained a much 
larger number than at present of yeomen freeholders sub- 
sisting by the cultivation of their own land. The char- 
acter of these men appears to be very distinctly marked 
upon the history of our revolution. They are the heart 
arid the sinews of the Puritan cause. In ordinary times 
they accept the leadership of the higher gentry, as the 
lists of Parliament show: but they have independent, 
opinions of their own: it is upon matter of conscience that 
they engage in the quarrel; and when the aristocracy 
desert the cause they stand firm to it, adhere to a leader 
of their own class, and bear him on to victory. An inde- 
pendent yeomanry has left a similar mark in the history of 
other countries, where that class has borne the brunt of 
patriotic or religious struggles, and most recently and 
signally in the history of the United States, where the 
yeomen, especially those of the west, were, throughout 
the late struggle with the slave-owners, the unshaken pil- 
lars of the Republic. The farmer, though less active- 
minded, of course, than the trader or the artisan, is, as a 
general rule, more meditative, has more depth of character, 



294 Appendix, 

and, when a principle comes home to him, grasps it more 
firmly. But to make his spirit independent, he should be 
the owner of his own land. 

The remnant of these yeomen still lingers, under the 
name of " statesmen," in Cumberland and Westmoreland, 
where they formed, in the language of Wordsworth, " a per- 
fect republic of shepherds and agriculturists, proprietors for 
the most part of the land which they occupied and cultiva- 
ted." But from the rest of England they have either alto- 
gether disappeared, or are very rapidly disappearing. Such, 
at least, is the conviction of all whom I have been able to 
consult, whether general economists or persons of local 
knowledge and experience. We have, unfortunately, no 
published statistics, of a trustworthy kind, as to the proprie- 
torship of land, and the changes which it has been under- 
going. 

Mr. Disraeli, indeed, in the speech in which he attacked 
the passage in the text, boasted that there were still four 
thousand freeholders upon the electoral register of Bucks, 
and he implied that these were freeholders of the old yeomen 
class, part of " the backbone of the country." There are 
not only four thousand freeholders on the register, but four 
thousand five hundred, the number having recently increased. 
But an inspection of the register at once indicates and local 
inquiry decisively confirms the indication, that, for the most 
part, these are not freeholders of the old yeoman kind. Of 
the 4500, 2100 only are at once occupiers and owners ; and 
of the holdings of these 2100, more than half are at an esti- 
mated rental of less than £14. The holdings of a large 
proportion are in towns, as Mr. Disraeli himself is always 
complaining, and belong to a class of electoral nuisance 
which he is always scheming to clear away from the fair face 
of the rural creation. The descriptions of the properties in 



Appendix. 295 

the electoral register are not precise, but when inspected, 
and compared with the electors' places of abode, it will be 
found that they are seldom suggestive of a freehold farm 
cultivated by a resident owner.* 



* In speaking of this question at Guildford, I took as a specimen the 
electoral register of the parish of Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks, not because 
I had or pretended to have any local information as to that parish, but as 
I stated at the time, because it happened to be the first rural parish in 
the register of the county. I believe I gave the analysis correctly. But 
there appears to be some discrepancy, not only between the electoral register 
and the actual list of land-holders in the parish, some of whom are females, 
or register their votes in other parishes, but between the impressions of 
local informants as to the character of some of the holdings and their 
occupants. The rector, who challenged my statement in a published letter, 
makes 10, and according to a list with which he has since favored me, 
even 13 " homesteads," while another informant thinks that the designation 
of ' ' yeoman subsisting by the cultivation of his own land " can be properly 
applied to only two holders, whose farms together comprise but 82 acres out 
of a total acreage of 3550. The last-mentioned informant also states, 
and is supported by other persons acquainted with the district in the 
statement, that the class of freeholders which existed in Hampden's days 
is quietly disappearing from that part of the country. It is useless, how- 
ever, to carry on a discussion respecting a single disputed instance, when 
the general fact is undisputed. I only wish to remark that my assertions 
were not ' ' random :" they were an account of a document before me, to 
which Mr. Disraeli had appealed. 

In the same speech (or, as I should rather call it, epilogue to my 
lecture) I alluded, in passing, to the connection of Milton with Chalfont 
St. Giles. My words I believe were, " There Milton found a refuge, at 
the time when Mr. Disraeli's party was in the ascendant." This seems to 
have been turned, in an abridged report, into " Thither Milton fled from 
the Tory mercies of the Restoration." The rector thereupon reminded 
me with some asperity that Milton had left London to avoid the plague, 
and that he was secured against personal danger by the Act of Indemnity. 
Milton left London to avoid the plague ; but he came to Chalfont, I appre- 
hend, because in that district the Hampden and Cromwell connection was 
very strong, and he would there be safe from annoyances against which 
no Act of Indemnity could secure him. (See Murray's Handbook for 
Bucks, under Amersham.) My real words imported no more. Milton, 



296 Appendix, 

The change is due, no doubt, mainly to economical causes 
independent of legislation. Wealth has of late years 
accumulated to an immense extent in commercial hands, 
and the first ambition of its possessors generally is to invest 
it in land. Prices are thus offered for land which the 
smaller holders can not resist. The high prices of the 
French war led land-owners into extravagance which, when 
peace and the fall of prices arrived, probably compelled the 
sale of many a yeoman's or small gentleman's estate. The 
habits of the farmer class generally, and of their families, 
have become more luxurious and expensive, and the prod- 
uce of a small holding has not sufficed for their desires. 
Money has also been borrowed for improvements, and the 
land has gone in the end to pay the debt. The running 
out of the leases on the Church and College estates has 
converted a considerable number of holdings which were 
practically almost freeholds into tenancies at will. 

It seems impossible, however, that entails, or to speak 
more accurately family settlements, and the law of pri- 
mogeniture in succession to intestates, which though seldom 
operative itself, leads the custom, should not greatly con- 
tribute to prevent the subdivision of land. Cases have 
been mentioned to me in which a subdivision has evidently 
followed upon the disentailment of a great estate, among 
others that of the great Buckingham estate, the disentail- 
ment of which, as I am informed, has brought into existence 
a considerable number of smaller proprietors.* 

however, did not feel himself quite so safe as the Eector of Chalfont 

thinks. 

14 On evil days though fallen and evil tongues ; 
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round 
And solitude." 

* I have been understood as saying that Jive hundred freeholders have 

been called into existence by the breaking up of the Buckingham estates. 

But this is a mistake. What I said was, that five hundred had been 



Appendix. 297 

I shall not attempt here to enter into the economical 
part of the question. All the ordinary laws of human 
nature must be reversed with regard to this subject, if 
security of tenure is not conducive to the progress of 
agriculture, provided that the holder has wherewithal to 
improve the land. It can scarcely be thought possible 
that land, if it continues to bear any thing like its 
present price, can pass to any considerable extent into the 
hands of peasant proprietors : but if thrown into a free 
market, it might pass to some extent into the hands of 
smaller holders subsisting by agriculture, and from whom 
active and successful farming might be expected. 

In a political point of view, the country has reason to 
lament the loss of a worthy and independent class of citi- 
zens. The most independent class now are the skilled 
artisans ; but the skilled artisans, with all their intelligence, 
have not the political any more than they have the physi- 
cal robustness of the yeoman : and moreover they are not, 
like the yeoman, a military power. 

In a social point of view the absence of so many of the 
great proprietors from their estates, either wholly or dur- 
ing the London season, and the immense interval between 
them and the mass of the laboring population, are great 
drawbacks from the civilizing influence which they are 
supposed to exercise. It is open to inquiry, at all events, 
whether a body of proprietors, tolerably educated, always 
resident and always in immediate contact with the laborer, 
might not be a benefical supplement to the squire and the 
tenant-farmer, the squire pressing the tenant, the tenant 
pressing those beneath him. 

added to the number of the Buckinghamshire freeholders on the electoral 
register, and that the recent increase, as I was informed, was partly caused 
by the breaking up of the Buckingham estate. 

N2 



298 



Appendix. 



Let artificial restrictions, such as the unnatural privilege 
of tying up land to persons not in being, be removed ; let 
land be brought freely into the market ; and all induce- 
ments and influences will, in the course of nature, have 
their just weight and find their proper level. Such, in 
every point of view, is the dictate of the general good, 
whatever the desire of maintaining a territorial aristocracy 
for political purposes may have to say upon the other side. 




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